


Color My Cheeks

by Copper_Nails (Her_Madjesty)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Arguably A Really Strange Slowburn, Exploring, F/M, Found Family, Lack of Communication, Like Slowburn in Reverse, Multiple Orgasms, Mutual Pining, Outdoor Sex, Porn with Feelings, Post-Scarif, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sex Pollen, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-13 05:29:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9108553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Copper_Nails
Summary: The crew of Rogue One gets sent on a scouting mission, post-Scarif, to explore a potential new home for the Rebel base. While exploring, Cassian and Jyn make an...interesting discovery about some of the planet's flora.





	1. Cassian

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a simple sex pollen piece, but then everyone developed feelings and bonded and now we're here. Cassian/Jyn is the only ship in this piece, but there's bonding between the whole of the Rogue One crew and some mentions of what behavior would be like post-Scarif, not to mention post-Jyn-living-alone-for-ages.
> 
> XOXO

Cassian doesn’t know who named the planet Shira, or which ragged smuggler stumbled across it first. He does know that smugglers that came after describe natives “like gungans, only they bite and their spit is poisonous” and jungles “muggier than morning breath and about as pleasant”.

Morning breath or not, the intelligence he’s gathered claims that the air is breathable, and that’s all that matters to the Alliance. The planet is teeming with natural resources and the space necessary for any old ambition gang of hellions to grow.

Thus, the new mission orders: despite his relatively recent release from Yavin’s med bay, Captain Cassian Andor is to lead a scouting team into the wilderness of Shira in order to assess whether or not the planet would be a suitable host for the next of the Rebellion’s bases. The council informs him, upon his briefing, that he is free to pick his own team, though that he must run a roster by Captain Draven before he departs.

Captain Draven has a new comm message waiting on his padd not five minutes after Cassian is dismissed from the war room.

Cassian picks his jacket up off of a stack of crates in the Yavin IV hanger and dusts it off as he walks. The crowd in the hanger remains thick, despite the lack of familiar faces. Cassian brushes past a pilot, her unmarred face no older than nineteen, and feels a heaviness settle into his steps. Scarif lingers on him like a bad stench; his knees twinge, and the roll of his walk no longer comes as easily as it once did. So long as he still holds his head high, however, he can see the odd veteran offer a nod of respect or a smart salute as he passes by.

It’s not that he needs the recognition, exactly, but a wiggling ache in his stomach eases at the familiarity of the motions, the acknowledgement of his duties – despite everything, he’s still Cassian Andor, he’s still with the Rebellion, he’s still _him_.

The ship Bodhi Rook has not-exactly commandeered for them is second from last in the hanger’s long row of what are effectively commuter crafts. Cassian’s boots fall heavy on the gangplank as he ascends; by the time he’s arrived in the main cabin, Bodhi has already swiveled around in the pilot’s seat to face him. The young man’s gaze remains a twitchy thing to hold, and when his hands aren’t wrapped around the wheel of a ship, they’re most often shaking. Cassian watches him with a careful eye and nods before turning his attention to the rest of the ship.

Baze has settled in one of the back corners and is, at present, disassembling one of his larger guns. He grunts when he sees Cassian looking at him, but doesn’t stop his work.

“Chirrut’s below with Jyn,” Bodhi says as Cassian’s gaze continues to wander. “They were arguing over rations, last I heard.”

Baze huffs, and Cassian’s ears twitch at the sound of his gun’s barrel coming apart. “She thinks there’s not enough,” he says, when Cassian turns. “They’re counting them out.”

Cassian closes his eyes for a moment and pushes a sigh out through his nose. He considers, briefly, descending into the hold and observing Jyn’s fussing for himself, but then dismisses the idea out of hand. Instead, he turns back to Bodhi. With a tilt of his head, the pilot welcomes Cassian into the seat beside him.

“We just have to wait for K-2, then radio over,” Bodhi says, “and we’ll be clear for takeoff.”

The droid’s refitted form had taken him less time to get used to than Cassian had anticipated, but the droid continued to test the boundaries of Cassian’s sympathy, puttering like a Gamorrean in the sunset of her life. Cassian’s huff of laughter blows the bangs out of his face; Bodhi glances at him and offers up a tentative, crooked smile in return.

A resounding smack sounds below deck. Their smiles are wiped away at once; Cassian and Baze are on their feet at the same time. Cassian’s hand is already twitching towards his blaster; Baze makes no move to reassemble his weapon, but the steel in his gaze grows sharper.

Both men exchange glances before inching towards the ladder that leaps below deck. In the creaking silence, they hear swearing, lilting high as it slips from a distinctly feminine mouth.

“Erso?” Cassian calls. He risks a peek down the ladder hatch and sees only grey floor, but his well-trained ears pick up another curse, albeit softer than its predecessor.

“I’m fine, Captain,” Jyn shouts back.

“I’m fine, as well,” Chirrut calls. His voice, perpetually tinged with laughter, remains even, though Cassian glances over and sees the lines around Baze’s eyes grow tight.

“What’s going on down there?” Cassian demands.

“Jyn is misdirecting her energy,” Chirrut says, as serene as ever. “I fear that she is particularly –”

Whatever Jyn particularly is (and Cassian can think of a lot of descriptors to follow that sentence up), Chirrut never reveals them. The hold of the ship sounds with another thump, followed just as abruptly by another of Jyn’s creative swears.

Cassian descends the ladder without using his feet, sliding down and landing, arms still hovering by his side. He takes in the scene before him with a tilt of his head as Baze crashes down beside him.

Jyn is glaring up at Chirrut from the floor of the hold, rubbing her back and swearing up a storm. Chirrut isn’t looking at her – his sightless eyes are fixed on the back wall of the hold – but he’s positioned himself between her and the closet that serves as the ship’s pantry. His staff is out, but not activated; it appears to be a stick of wood as opposed to the lethal weapon that Baze, Cassian, and Jyn recognize it as.

All the same, Jyn makes her way back to her feet. Before she can throw herself at Chirrut again, Cassian’s moving forward and placing a heavy hand on her shoulder.

“What’s going on?” he asks again, careful to keep his voice steady. Jyn whips her head around to glare at him, but there’s a tinge of guilt lingering around the corners of her eyes.

Cassian is familiar with this look. He gives her a brief once over and takes in her shaking hands, the tension in her shoulders, and the thinness of her mouth.

The rations have been tucked away in neat rows; Chirrut stands guard over them, his breath coming as easily as ever. Jyn’s gaze flickers back to them, and Cassian sees her eyes flash with fear.

( _How many nights did you go hungry?_ he thinks, watching her. _How many weeks can you go without a meal?_ )

“Jyn,” he says, lowering his voice. “Go up top and help Bodhi prepare for takeoff.”

It looks as though she wants to snarl at him, but the line of respect between the two of them runs…deep.

(He remembers the burn of her skin against his, the press of her head against his chest, the thundering of her heartbeat next to his. She doesn’t owe him anything, and he doesn’t owe her, but there’s a twinge beneath his breast whenever he looks her way, or whenever they hover in each other’s space for a little too long.)

Jyn stares at him through eyes narrowed by animal instinct, but, at last, she listens. She pushes past him, brushing against his arm as she goes. She brushes against Baze, too, as he steps towards Chirrut, but the blind guardian is quick to wave his companion away.

“She meant no harm,” he says, just as Jyn reaches the top of the ladder.

“Intention doesn’t negate results,” Baze grumbles. Cassian shoots him a sharp look, but Baze ignores him in favor of taking the final steps over to Chirrut’s side. There’s a rough affection to the cant of his voice, however, and Jyn’s brush against him ushered in no house of pain, so Cassian decides to let an old man’s muttering aside.

He makes his way back up to the main deck in time to see K-2SO ducking through the ship’s still-open, hanger-side door.

“What took you so long?” he asks, moving past the hovering Jyn towards the co-pilot’s seat.

“I had to conclude my most recent backups, as you requested,” K-W drawls. It’s an odd tone to hear from an ex-Imperial droid, but Cassian accepts it with a shrug. “Two of the copies are to remain in your quarters here, and an additional copy that has been delivered to Senator Mothma. I will also be backing up into this ship’s data base upon our departure.”

“Good.” There’s more conviction in his voice than he means for there to be, and Cassian winces at the moment of weakness. He doesn’t have to look back to know that one of Jyn’s eyebrows has twitched upward; she’s likely crossed her arms, as well, and if he turns, he’ll see his own hypocrisy spelled out across her pale skin.

(He knows what it’s like to go without, too.)

“There is a fifty eight percent chance that it will not be necessary to access these drives over the course of this mission,” K-2 informs him. “Your paranoia has increased by three percent since we returned to the base.”

“And I wonder why that is,” Cassian mutters. He hears Jyn sniff, a condescending little thing, before she takes her seat towards the back of the upper deck. Cassian keeps his gaze on the ship’s long control panel and flicks the necessary switch to bring the gangplank sailing upward. “Two minutes until departure,” he informs Bodhi. “Call it in.”

*

They drop out of hyperspace and into the Outer Rim with relative ease. Cassian and Bodhi shoot glances back at the crew, all of whom are in some state of doze in the back of the main cabin. Chirrut is stretched out, arms askew, with his head on Baze’s shoulder; Baze is effectively upright, save for the way his head nods, now and then.

Jyn has her head resting against Chirrut’s knee. She flinches in her sleep every so often – a twitch of a leg or a clench of a hand – but otherwise, she rests. Cassian observes her position on the floor of the ship with a curious stab pulsing through his chest, but he reins the feeling in. K-2’s optical sensors turn on him as often as Jyn flinches; he takes care never to stare for too long, but the sinking of his stomach (along with K-2’s occasional thoracic shuddering) informs him that he’s failing.

She’s the first to shoot awake when Bodhi brings the ship down for landing, though Baze is quick to follow. Chirrut blinks, then stretches like a loth-cat, smacking the sleep out of his mouth. Cassian keeps his gaze on the control panel, listening, instead, to their waking sounds as the ship touches down.

Bodhi lets out a sigh and pulls his hands away from the wheel the moment the ship makes contact. Cassian shakes his head but can’t help the brief smile that flashes over his face. Once he’s ensured that all systems remain functional, he swivels in his chair and takes in his still-waking crew.

Jyn meets his gaze from across the cabin and offers up the smallest of smiles. Cassian nods back, then waits, fingers interlaced, for their full attention to settle on him.

“This is a scouting mission,” he reminds them, watching as Jyn rolls her eyes. “No engaging the locals, no destroying the landscape for weapons testing,” here Baze looks away, “and no wandering off on your own. Bodhi, you’ll be staying with the ship.”

“Of course I will,” Bodhi mutters.

“And K-2 will be staying with you,” Cassian snaps. Bodhi flinches, and he almost feels bad, but then swivels his attention back to the crew. “Jyn, you’re with me. Chirrut, Baze –” he trails off, watching as one of Jyn’s eyebrows shoots upward. His jaw clamps shut with an audible click, but he waits, watching as the corner of her mouth quirks upward.

“Your desire for quiet surveillance may have warranted a more subtle crew,” K-2 interjects. Baze laughs aloud at this, and the quirk of Jyn’s mouth grows broader. Chirrut shakes his head and smiles, unashamed.

Cassian brings a hand up to one of his temples and rubs away the headache he feels beginning to form there.

They depart in shifts, amidst chuckling and a knocking of elbows. Cassian watches with a wary eye as Chirrut and Baze disappear into the thick jungle, following their colorful attire until it’s out of sight. His breath catches for a second, maybe less, as Jyn settles in at his side, but he is first and foremost a spy. He knows how to control himself.

“We wait five minutes,” he tells her, “and then we head in the opposite direction.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” Jyn says.

Cassian glances at her out of the corner of his eye and sees the last second of the smile she’d been wearing. There’s still a jumpiness about her, but it’s one that he’s well familiar with; it’s one that all veterans of the Rebellion carry about them, though he supposes it runs deeper for her than most. All the same, a knot in his chest loosens at the sight of her relaxed at his side.

“You going to be okay, Bodhi?” he asks, forcing himself to look away from her.

“I’ll be fine,” Bodhi calls back. He’s propped his feet up on the ship’s console and tucked his arms back behind his head.

“Lieutenant Rook has informed me that he requires rest,” K-2 says. “I will be taking first watch while he indulges in a nap. Please try not to get yourself killed for another two hours, at least.”

“We’ll do our best,” Cassian says, keeping his nod as solemn as he can. He sees Bodhi roll his eyes in the background; K-2 only nods, the joints of his neck creaking as he does.

He motions Jyn forward, several heartbeats later. She doesn’t look at him, just adjusts her grip on the blaster that still isn’t technically hers, then moves forward. Cassian takes one breath, then pushes all of the air out of his lungs. The jungle air is stifling as he goes to follow her, but the strain feels good; it occupies his mind, keeps him moving forward.

He thinks he hears Bodhi wish them luck as they go, but it could be his imagination.

They wander. Jyn pushes through the green undergrowth without hesitation, leaving Cassian to linger just behind her. She winces, now and then, when a bush is too prickly, but the worse that comes of the encounters are her momentary pain – while Cassian doesn’t relish this as much as he once thought he would, he finds himself relieved, all the same.

The jungle growth grows thinner, after a while, though not due, it seems, to signs of civilization. Cassian frowns, following thick vines with his eyes, as the spaces between trees becomes wider. Their trunks, he notices, are thicker, and the shade above their heads seems more heavily steeped in shadow. The wildlife his well-trained ears can detect grows scanter, less talkative; before long, the jungle is quiet save for the sounds of his and Jyn’s footsteps.

“This gives me the creeps,” Jyn murmurs, and it takes Cassian a moment to realize what she’s talking about. He grunts back, focusing instead on stepping around a flowering bush. It’s covered in the brightest pink blooms he’s ever seen in his life, and he’s tempted, for a moment, to stop and inspect them more closely. The moment he freezes, however, Jyn turns; she looks back at him, calm and curious, but he still sees her hand move towards her weapon.

It hurts him, her tension, as much as it pleases him. An idea flickers through his head, almost an afterthought; his hand brushes against the pink flowers and plucks one from its bush. Cassian takes a tentative step forward, watching Jyn with careful eyes, waiting for her to flinch away from him.

She doesn’t.

When there is less than an inch between the two of them, Cassian slips the flower behind Jyn’s ear. He tucks it between two strands of hair, then gives it a pat, just to make sure it’s secure. Jyn blinks up at him, a furrow forming between her brows, but the smile she works so hard to hide sneaks its way back onto her face.

“What is this for?” she asks, bringing a hand up to touch the bloom.

Cassian opens his mouth only to find that his words have been stolen from him. Instead, he shrugs and shoves his hands deep into his jacket pockets.

The air around the two of them seems to grow heavier. Jyn looks at him for a moment longer before the line between her brows flattens out. With a shake of her head, she turns and continues forward.

Cassian stares after the line of her back for a long moment before following.

The bushes of flowers appear more frequently as they walk on. Jyn’s fingers drag over them with a casualness Cassian envies; he sees some of the pollen catch on her fingers, staining her pale skin a dim red. She doesn’t seem to notice, herself, though her glances backward become more and more frequent. He catches her staring at him, her eyes burning, and feels his heart stutter in his chest, but it’s a brief, aborted thing.

(He stares back, after that. His hands find the flowers more often, too, and he finds himself wondering what she’d look like with a halo of them in her hair. Cassian plucks one of the flowers and rolls it between his fingers, his gaze fixed on the curve of Jyn’s neck.)

He’s not sure when they stop moving.

Cassian finds himself hovering less than an inch away from Jyn’s back, breathing heavily, though their pace has never been faster than a brisk walk. She’s still, head partially turned, as though she’s listening to every inhale. There are bushes on every side of her; they’d have to weave through them to continue moving forward, and her hesitation – well, it doesn’t feel exactly like hesitation, but Cassian feels inclined to indulge it, if only for a moment.

“What’s the matter?” he asks, voice rough and breathless. Jyn shifts, and for a moment, the warmth of her brushes against his chest, against the front of his thighs. Cassian is hit by a wave of dizziness and a heat warmer than the jungle’s humidity. He shrugs out of his jacket while he waits for her to reply and lets it drop to the mossy ground.

“Nothing,” Jyn murmurs back. She turns to face him properly, now, blinking at the sight of his white shirt. She licks her lips with a tongue too red, and it becomes hard for Cassian to swallow. “It’s nothing.”

“Are you sure?” Cassian asks. Somewhere, behind the storm brewing in his mind, there is a flash of concern; it dulls itself, though, when Jyn shakes her head. Her pupils, he notices, are blown out, and her eyes are glazed. Her cheeks have gone a lovely shade of red, and her gaze is lingering on his chest, on his collarbone, tracing like a touch all the way up to his mouth.

He wants to whine, feels the muscles of his arms ache as he holds back, waiting, watching – wanting.

It clicks in his head, with that, and the warmth in his stomach turns into a blaze. He _wants_ her, wants her in a way that’s more powerful than normal, that’s more – more, more, _more_. She looks up at him through her lashes as he steps further into her space; she shivers as he brushes his hands over her arms. She shrugs out of her jacket, too, and lets it land next to his. Her mouth falls open; he thinks he hears her say something about the heat, but his head is abuzz and his body is on fire.

“Jyn,” he murmurs, leaning forward.

Her voice stops. He sees her blink, then feels her shift beneath his hands. She rises up on her toes and brushes her lips against his, barely a touch. She is soft and warm against him.

With this, Cassian breaks.

He doesn’t quite tackle her to the ground, but it’s a near thing; they go tumbling, anyway, Jyn’s back hitting the moss and jackets that they’ve abandoned. Cassian hears her grunt, but he doesn’t stop moving; his hands skim over her arms, over the skin of her neck, coming up to cup her cheeks. Jyn mewls into his mouth, runs her tongue over his bottom lip, then whines again as he opens for her. Another wave of dizziness threatens to send Cassian tumbling off of her; he gasps and feels her tongue seek out his, demanding, absolutely Jyn.

She presses her body up against his, unrelenting and unforgiving; even through their layers of clothes (and there are so many unnecessary layers), she burns him. Cassian growls and shucks his shirt off; when their lips break apart, Jyn does much the same. She wraps her legs around his waist and grinds down, her back arching as she brushes against the hard length of his cock.

Cassian’s breath stutters. He buries his face in the crook of her neck and _whines_ , rutting against her while sucking a bruise into her skin. It’s been so long – it’s been too long, since before her, but after meeting her, there simply hadn’t been a reason to…well, indulge if she wasn’t the one he was with.

He indulges now. The warmth of her is all-consuming; he’s hard in a way that toes on painful, but the friction of her against him is good, too good. Cassian swears, then moves his mouth back up to hers.

Supporting himself on an elbow, he ghosts a hand over her breasts. Jyn presses up into him at once, nipping at his bottom lip, and Cassian feels his thought processes grind to a halt.

Her breastband rips when he tears it off of her. Her skin is magic beneath his fingers; he sits up and brings both hands to her breasts; tweaking her nipples while she wiggles beneath him, begging for him in a way that threatens to make him come on the spot.

He presses his mouth to one of her breasts in the same moment she tugs off his trousers, followed swiftly by his pants. He’s leaking, dragging against her, and this is what does him in. His mouth falls open, and he pillows his head in her breasts as he comes. Jyn’s hands settle on his hips as he dry humps against her trousers, moving with him as his whines grow higher and higher.

When he opens his eyes again, still panting, it’s to find her shining eyes staring up at him.

He tries to offer her a crooked, apologetic smile, but he’s not sure his mouth manages.

Her trousers, soaked with him, come off next; Cassian moves himself down and settles between her thighs, relishing the way his wandering hands make her squirm. He kisses her through her small clothes, tasting the salt of her wetness on his tongue. Jyn turns his name into a chant, into a prayer, as she begs for him to touch her.

Were his mind not buzzing and his cock not still pulsing, he’d tease her until she was beyond even speech. Now, however, Cassian’s cock is growing hard again, and the fire in his belly is propelling him forward. He takes Jyn’s small clothes from her and buries himself in her cunt, licking at the nub of her clit and listening as his name is ripped from her lips.

When he brings his hand up to assist his mouth, she comes, shivering and digging her hands into the moss beneath her.

Cassian pulls away while she’s still shuddering, though his hands remains, a steadying post for her to grind against. He catches sight of the pink flower, still tucked behind her ear, and leans down to press a kiss to the skin there. A bit of the pollen catches on his mouth, and the world goes white.

Cassian growls, his hands migrating up to Jyn’s hips. She keens as he pushes himself against her, the hardness of his cock already restored (and, were he able to think, he’d wonder at this). He lets her press against him, her cunt soaking, before entering her in a breathless slide.

He doesn’t expect her to ride him with her back against the ground, but, in the end, it doesn’t surprise him. Jyn controls their pace, keeping the grip of her thighs around Cassian’s waist tight. Her hands tangle in his hair, covered with pink pollen, and when she kisses him, her mouth tastes of flowers. Lights appear behind Cassian’s eyelids; the rutting of his hips is mindless, chasing the pleasure of friction and of her, her, always her. He brings a hand down to rub against her clit and swallows her subsequent scream as she comes for a second time.

He loses track of time, after that, as the waves of pleasure wash out the world around him. He knows that he comes again, this time inside of her; he comes for a third time with his cock in between her breasts, entranced by the smile on her lips. She comes to his fingers, then again to his mouth; her hair comes undone and fans out beneath her until she flips him onto his back. She bounces on his cock, after that, and it’s so good that it’s painful. Cassian, whose fabric of being demands control, swears so loudly when he comes again that the entire world seems to shudder.

He’s busy sucking another bruise into Jyn’s collar, loving her breasts with his hands, when he feels cold metal close around his shoulder. Before he has time to process what’s happening, he’s flung backwards. His back slams against the trunk of a nearby tree, and he groans, but the pain doesn’t fully register. Across the distance, he sees Jyn sitting, blinking, from between the legs of an impossibly tall droid. The droid’s head has rotated, however, and fixed its optical sensors on him.

“Do not move, Cassian,” it orders him (through the pink fog that’s overtaken his brain, Cassian thinks that the voice is somewhat familiar). “Your hormones are entirely unbalanced, and your health could well be at risk, if not from chemical manipulation, then from dehydration.”

Cassian catches every third word of this, already attempting to move forward. A human hand draws him backwards, this time; when he looks up, it’s to find a man staring down at him with a scarf drawn across his mouth.

(Baze, the deeper parts of his brain inform him. Baze is a friend.)

Cassian does what he can to shrug the hand off of his skin, then to bite it. He thinks he hears laughter, but it’s a muffled thing.

Across the way, Jyn calls his name. Any attempt at a thought shuts down at once; he’s scrambling to get to her, desperate –

The world goes dark.

Cassian sleeps.

*

He wakes to the rumble of a ship’s hyperdrive and Bodhi’s gentle, foreign humming.

Cassian tries to right himself, then stops with a quiet swear. The length of his body is in pain; parts of him feel like they’ve been bruised down to the bone, while others still feel…well used.

He lets his head fall back and hit the jacket that’s currently serving as his pillow.

“Good morning,” Bodhi calls. Cassian winces at the smugness of his voice. “I hope your enjoyed your beauty sleep.”

Cassian manages to roll his eyes at the comment, but it’s a near thing. “What happened?” he croaks, pushing through the soreness of his throat.

He can’t see the flush that breaks out across Bodhi’s face, but he can hear the new stutter in the pilot’s voice. “Shira turned out to have some…interesting flora,” he says. “Flora that makes it unsuitable for a future Rebel base.”

Cassian closes his eyes, at this, and tries not to sigh. His memory is clouded; there’s a swath of green, endless green, speckled through with brown hair and hooded eyes and warmth pressed against his tongue.

He shoots upright, swearing as the muscles in his back pop. “Where’s Jyn?” he demands.

Bodhi still doesn’t turn around. “She’s below deck,” he says. “She got hit with the worst of the flora, which means she’s been a little more difficult to control. Not that that’s any different from normal.”

“Cassian?” a suitably robotic voice calls up. The grate of it drags against Cassian’s skull but leaves him relieved, all the same.

“K-2?”

There is a moment of clattered noise, metal scraping against metal. Then K-2’s head emerges from the ladder hatch that leads below deck.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

Cassian’s long adjusted to the dryness of his friend’s voice, but he finds himself narrowing his eyes, all the same. “What’s going on, K?”

“I knew your memory would be impact,” K-2 grumbles. Bodhi shoots him a look that Cassian thinks is supposed to be threatening, by the droid seems unimpressed. “You and Miss Erso fell under the influence of an aphrodisiacal flora native to Shira. Unable to control yourselves, you fornicated, neglecting to take care of yourself and threatening your physical well-being.”

Cassian’s mouth thins out at once. He takes a deep breath, then drags a hand down his face.

“It’s true,” Bodhi adds, as though additional information will keep Cassian from wanting to throw himself out the airlock. “Baze brought you back to the ship unconscious; he said he had to knock you out himself.”

“I suppose he enjoyed it, too,” Cassian mutters. He refuses to look at the pilot, can barely look at K-2. A well of shame threatens to open up in his stomach, but he fights it back. Instead, he focuses in on the details of the ship – and the people missing from the upper deck.

“Miss Erso’s situation has improved,” K-2 informs him. “Though I advise against you seeing her until we arrive back on Yavin, and that is at the earliest. She experienced a more potent influx of the chemicals than you did, and her behavior is still, therefore, impacted.”

The well of shame growls up at him, familiar and ugly. Cassian runs his hand over his face again and does his best not to curse himself aloud. He should have known that she was acting strangely; he should have kept a better eye on her instead of letting himself get swept up in the madness and the heat and –

And –

“I’m going back to sleep,” he announced, throwing himself back down onto the floor.

“You do that, captain,” Bodhi says. He adjusts something on the ship’s console, then sends a sympathetic glance backwards. “We’ve got a couple of hours yet until we reach the base – if you’re still out, one of us will wake you up.”

“It will not be Miss Erso,” K-2 says. Cassian tries not to groan at the sullen smugness of the droid’s voice. “Perhaps it will be Baze, instead.”

Cassian curls deeper into himself and remains silent, waiting for the moment to pass. Only when he hears K-2’s grinding steps grow more distant does he relax even minutely.

The cabin of the ship is quiet. Just as Cassian begins to doze, however, he hears Bodhi let out a soft laugh.

“Don’t worry, Captain,” the pilot says, amusement laced through his voice. “Based on the shouts we were picking up, we can at the least say that she enjoyed it.”

Cassian groans and resolves that his best solution to this…this _nonsense_ is to sleep, preferably for the rest of his life.


	2. Jyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are repercussions (and a second point of view)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm affectionately glaring at all of you. You can't see it, but believe me: it's incredibly intimidating but also wonderfully fond.
> 
> You nerds. This was supposed to be a one shot. Now it's getting three parts and is over 10k long. Are you happy? Are you silly geese happy?
> 
> Enjoy ;) XOXO

It takes her a while to realize that the flowers don’t have a smell – at least, not one detectable to humans. Jyn brushes her hand over one of the nearby bushes and sniffs, idly flipping through a catalogue of foliage in her head. As foreign as Shira is to everyone in their party, it’s a standard jungle planet orbiting an equally standard sun. Simple reason dictates that its ecosystems bear some similarities to those jungles Jyn’s trekked through before.

But the flowers don’t have a smell.

Jyn casts a glance back at Cassian – he’s trailing about a foot behind her, further back than she thinks he’s ever been before. Her skin prickles at the odd sense of space between them; he’d made such a point of hovering near her back on previous missions that the distance feels…forced.

Jyn lets one of her steps take a little longer than usual to fall. The area between the two of them shrinks by a rough inch.

Her hand drags over one of the bushes – some plants only release a scent if stimulated; these may well be some of that kind, and even if they aren’t, pollen always reveals some details about a plant’s make up. Jyn pulls her hand away for a moment and finds that the tips of her fingers have gone pink-red with pollen. She narrows her eyes, brings her hand up just beneath her nose, and gives another tentative sniff.

The jungle air seems to grow significantly warmer. Jyn blinks, then lets her hand fall to her side. She looks back to Cassian once more and finds him staring at her, his eyes unusually dark even in the shadows of the jungle. Jyn studies him, letting the inexplicable warmth of her body fall to the back of her mind.

His shoulders are bunched up, leaving wrinkles in his jacket that aren’t normally there. His hands are slow to loosen at his side, but he has, at least, forgone his usual gloves. There’s a stain of pink, or so Jyn thinks, on the fingers that plucked up the flower that’s tucked behind her ear.

His gaze doesn’t fall from her while she inspects him. Jyn catches his eye and feels as though she should flush. She considers, briefly, looking away, but the roll of Cassian’s hips as he walks and the stretch of him – the way he tilts his head, questioning –

Jyn’s feet stop moving forward of their own accord. The space between her body and Cassian’s drops by half a foot more; by the time he stops, too, she can feel the warmth of him burning through her jacket.

“What’s the matter?” he murmurs, and Jyn can’t recall a time when his voice has ever been so breathless. He blinks at her, long and slow; his hands twitch at his side. The heat teasing over Jyn’s skin flares at the sight.

“Nothing,” she says. Her own voice has to be forced from her throat; her brain grows idle, tracing the lines of Cassian’s slightly sweaty chest beneath his Rebellion fatigues. “It’s nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

Jyn’s gaze moves up to Cassian’s collarbone, lingering there. Her mind registers his question, and some deep, undeniable place in her wants to reach out and respond – it’s never nothing when it comes to their group, or the Alliance, or anything else she finds herself being talked into. It’s _never_ nothing, but her gaze drifts up to Cassian’s mouth, and for a moment – well.

She shrugs out of her jacket as she turns all the way around to face him. The offending, overwarm leather falls onto the jungle floor. Jyn watches – keeps herself from sucking in a breath of surprise – when Cassian does much the same.

(She wonders: is his skin as warm as hers? Is the heat making his head swim? Is his mouth, clever and dark, warm, dry like hers? Would the taste of it cool her down or set her on fire?)

Cassian steps forward. His hands, where they brush over her arms, and burning. “Jyn,” he murmurs.

Jyn feels a puff of his breath against her mouth as he leans towards her – he’s wavering on something, she realizes, through a thick cloud of haze. There’s something he _wants_ here; he’s just not sure as to whether or not he can have it.

Were her mind clearer, Jyn would laugh. As it is, she smiles as she stands up on her toes. She wraps her hands into the collar of Cassian’s shirt and pulls him to her, letting their noses knock as she brushes her mouth over his.

A growl escapes him as she pulls away that makes the whole of Jyn’s body shiver.

He doesn’t quite tackle her to the ground, but it’s a near thing; his arms wrap around her in the same moment his mouth recaptures hers, and somewhere in there her feet lose contact with the ground. She feels her back hit the jackets they’ve abandoned and she grunts for it, but the pain is less pain and far more pleasure.

She tangles her fingers in his hair, pulling as his hands dance over her body. She runs her tongue over his bottom lip, tasting iron and sweat, and whines as he opens for her. He gasps, and she swallows the sound. The fire in her belly is roaring, demanding to be sated, and there’s a dizziness spinning her head that renders the rest of the jungle mute, unimportant, almost invisible.

She presses her body up against his, letting the warmth of him stoke her flames higher. Cassian growls again and pulls away from her only long enough to shuck off his shirt. Jyn finds herself staring at the scarred skin of his collarbone and chest before she can wiggle out of her own. She wraps her legs around his waist and grinds down, her back arching as she brushes against the hard length of his cock.

The stutter of Cassian’s breath nearly breaks her. He whines as he ruts against her, and Jyn feels herself spiraling higher, gripping his shoulders as he moves. It’s delicious, the friction that builds up between them, and whenever she closes her eyes, the world is white instead of steeped in shadow.

Cassian sucks a bruise into her skin, sharp and painful, but the feel of his mouth leaves Jyn begging, nipping kisses at whatever skin she can reach. She grinds down against him again and hears him swear before he moves his mouth back up to hers.

He ghosts a hand over her breasts as she goes, and Jyn snarls into his mouth, desperate. She bites, then lavishes the ache of his lip with her tongue.

Her breastband rips when he tears it off of her. Were she of clearer mind, she would mourn the loss, but the world has gone pink and Cassian’s hands are on her breasts, tweaking her nipples and leaving her to relock her legs around him, eager for the feeling of his cock against her.

He presses his mouth to one of her breasts in the same moment she tugs off his trousers, followed swiftly by his pants. He’s leaking, dragging against her, and Jyn pushes against him harder for it. Her hands fall onto his waist in the same moment his breath catches. He whines, long and low, but the noise drags higher as he releases. The world is warm and hazy for a long moment, despite the tight curl of desire between Jyn’s own legs.

She watches as he comes back down. His chest rises and falls, brushing against hers as he pants, trying to catch his breath.

She wants to say something – tease him for being quick, tell him that she’s flattered – but the words stick in her throat. When he opens his eyes again, it’s only to find her staring at him with something warm and brutal glowing in her chest.

Her trousers, soaked with him, come off next. Cassian moves himself down and settles between her legs. Jyn bucks up as his hands wander, brushing over the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. She knows that she’s wet, but doesn’t realize how much so until Cassian kisses her through her small clothes. She turns his name into a prayer as he does it again, barely aware as her world is reduced down to his mouth, his tongue, and his name on her lips.

She’s not sure where her small clothes end up. All she knows is that, within moments, Cassian’s mouth is on her, his tongue licking against her clit. She winds a hand through his hair and tries not to cry out, but his name escapes her, all the same.

Then a finger joins his mouth, slipping into her with an ease that almost frightens her. Jyn rides him, anyway, letting him fit another digit inside of her. When she comes, it’s like the world’s been washed clean. She digs her hands into the moss beneath her and lets the shivering pleasure consume her. She arches into Cassian’s mouth and moans as he pulls away.

She’s still coming down when she feels his hands settle back on her hips. He enters her with a breathless slide, and the pleasure returns, as bold and demanding as it had been before she’d come.

In a brief moment of clarity, Jyn manages to dig her fingers deeper into the jungle’s moss. She feels Cassian shift above her, but she bucks her hips and guides him, bouncing on his cock and watching his face go lax with pleasure for it. His hands tangle in her hair, covered with pink pollen, and when she kisses him, his mouth tastes of flowers. His rutting becomes mindless, and Jyn can’t control their pace anymore, doesn’t want to.

One of his hands ventures down to rub against her clit again; his hot mouth swallows her cry as she comes for a second time.

Things begin to blur, after that, her mind awash with a pink fog and near-constant pleasure. It almost hurts when he comes inside of her, overstimulation whiting out her brain. She pulls herself off of him, once he’s finished, but finds his cock still hard, his eyes still desperate, his hands still reaching for her. His skin is addictive when she touches it; she kisses him until they’re both dizzy, then lets him rut in between her breasts until he comes again.

He offers his fingers to her, next, and sends her over the edge once; it takes him less than a minute to drive her higher again, this time with his mouth. Her loose hair falls into her face as she goes to straddle him, having pushed him down onto his back. She rides him again, kissing the corners of his mouth and tasting the wetness of herself on his tongue. It hurts when she comes again, but the pain doubles back into pleasure and sends her tumbling, over and over and over.

She’s on her back again, Cassian’s mouth at her throat and hands on her breasts, when he disappears. Jyn bolts upright, chasing his absent warmth, only to feel something cold and impersonal stop her in her tracks. She blinks upward at an impossibly tall droid and processes the shine of its white optical sensors narrowing before her mind is lost to pink haze once more.

“Do not move, Cassian,” it orders, and the mere sound of Cassian’s name is enough to send Jyn scrambling. The droid removes its hand from her skin, but Jyn still finds her movements stopped. A long bar crosses over her chest; she fights it, but the weapon moves with ease, wielded skillfully by an enemy she has no desire to identify.

“Jyn,” a voice says (almost familiar, barely familiar). “Breathe, Jyn.”

She is breathing, but it’s easier to breathe when Cassian’s there. She receives another whack on the chest as she tries to stand and wonders, in the part of her brain that can still think, whether or not she’ll have a bruise for it. The droid moves to incapacitate Cassian; Jyn calls for him, the heat in her belly still burning.

She watches as he start to rise, then sees another man knock him out cold.

She screams and brushes her restraints aside without a thought. The droid turns and catches her as she lunges for Cassian; it holds her steady, no matter how hard she fights. She hears a gentle cluck of distress from behind her, but it barely registers.

“I advise that you render her unconscious, as well,” she hears the droid say, though she doesn’t know who the words are directed at. “Any restraints would be welcome, as well; I’m registering significantly higher contamination rates in her system than in Cassian’s.”

“There’s a flower behind her ear,” a gruff voice says. “Probably more exposure.”

“Curious,” another voice says, and Jyn is surprised by the way the speaker’s exasperation is balanced out by genuine interest. “K-2SO, could you lower her a little, please?”

After a moment, Jyn’s feet can almost brush the ground. She wiggles as hard as she can, but the droid’s grip only tightens.

“Rest easy, Jyn,” the same voice tells her. “Sleep for a while.”

She feels a prick of something at the break between her shoulder and her neck. The world flickers for a moment, pink, then blue. Then everything goes dark.

*

When she wakes, the headache behind her eyes is _pounding_.

She smacks a dry mouth and stares at her surroundings, struck by the thin gauze of pink that still hinders her gaze. Jyn fixes on the sight of a ladder and stares. Her thoughts are scattered, and the world still unsure, but it’s clear that, at the least, she’s been captured.

There’s a gentle chanting coming from the corner to her left; Jyn looks over and sees a man, his legs crossed, staring straight forward through pale eyes. A second man – looking slightly more familiar, now, though Jyn doesn’t know where she would know him from – watches her with a careful eye from the opposite side of the deck.

The droid is nowhere to be seen.

 _Cassian_ is nowhere to be seen.

The thought of him – lips puffy, hair mussed, pink pollen on his palms – looses a whimper from Jyn’s mouth. She tugs on the handcuffs that party has put her in and tries to stand.

A hand is on her shoulder at once, forcing her back down. Jyn snarls, but her body aches too much for her to fight back (her legs are shaking, anyway, and the world is spinning, just a little).

“Stay down, little sister,” one of her captors says. The other continues his chanting, his sightless eyes wide open.

“I want Cassian,” Jyn snaps (it hurts to talk; why does it hurt to talk?)

“We know you do.” There’s some raw amusement tucked behind her captor’s voice, and Jyn has to work not to bristle at the implications.

She opens her mouth to respond only to find the lid of a canteen butting up against her mouth. It tastes like dust and steel; she raises an eyebrow up at her captor. The man only shrugs.

“You’re dehydrated. Drink.”

Jyn looks at the canteen and considers. She’s wearing borrowed clothes on a ship she doesn’t recognize and is being guarded by two…curious individuals who she doesn’t quite classify as enemies but wouldn’t dream of classifying as friends. She has a vague understanding of who she is, but she doesn’t know the planet, the date, or even what time of day it is.

“Drink,” the man says again.

Jyn looks at him for a moment longer, then does as she’s told. The water tastes a little sharp – local, no doubt, though cleaner than she’d expected. She drinks until the man pulls his canteen away, and she smacks her lips as he does. He settles back against his wall, eyes drifting from her to his companion. Jyn follows his gaze and feels something in her begin to settle.

“I am one with the Force; the Force is with me. I am one with the Force; the Force is with me. I am one with the Force; the Force is with me.”

Jyn closes her eyes and lets the noise wash over her, drowning out her headache and the burn in her belly. The flare reduces itself to embers, then to ash.

She sleeps.

*

When she wakes for the second time, her lips are chapped, her eyes are burning, but she remembers where she is. Jyn wrenches herself upright and winces, blinking into the darkness of lower deck of their Rebel ship.

Chirrut – her chanting man – is still inhabiting his corner, his legs crossed with his hands resting on his knees, palms facing upward. His sightless eyes are closed, now, but Jyn watches his breathing and knows, somehow, that he’s still awake.

Baze is staring at her from the opposite corner with wariness around his mouth. When Jyn looks to him, he stiffens. She offers him a grimace, in response, along with a small wave.

Baze relaxes like a rock slide. He leans his head back against the lower deck’s steel wall. “Good to have you back,” he grunts. His hands curl out of their fists as he settles onto the ground.

“How long was I out?” Jyn asks. She takes care to keep her voice soft and her ears pricked. There’s movement from the deck above her – Bodhi, she assumes, and K-2SO, and – “Where’s Cassian?”

The eye roll Baze graces her with elicits only a raised eyebrow in response.

“You slept for two hours,” Chirrut says, across the way. Jyn swings her gaze over to him in time to see him start to smile. “Though you were incapacitated for four.”

The raised eyebrow lowers into a furrow that Chirrut cannot see. “Incapacitated?”

“Memory loss,” Baze grunts. He doesn’t rise from the floor, only shakes his head. “The droid will explain it to you,” he tells Jyn. “He’s already told the captain.”

“Cassian’s fine, then?” Jyn says. A fist unclenches around her heart; she closes her eyes for the briefest of moments and lets her relief dance in the air. She wonders at the feeling for a long moment, then, opening her eyes, opts to ignore it.

“As fine as he can be,” Baze replies.

“You were exposed to more dangers than the captain was,” Chirrut says. “If ‘dangers’ is the word for it. He woke up half an hour ago, though I suspect he’s asleep once more.”

“Doubt it,” Baze mutters.

Jyn looks between the two of them, Chirrut with his palms still facing the sky, Baze with his arms crossed over his chest.

“What happened?” she asks again.

Baze’s eyes slip shut. Chirrut’s smile shivers into something like a smirk, but he only shakes his head.

Jyn rolls her eyes in front of an unseeing audience. “Can one of you take off my cuffs, at least?” she asks, wincing at the whine in her voice.

Baze chuckles. Chirrut laughs outright.

She doesn’t leave the lower deck, even after she’s been freed. Instead, she settles down on the floor, legs crossed, like Chirrut, and lets the vibrations of the hyperdrive rock through her. Chirrut returns to his quiet meditations; Baze goes to sleep. Jyn listens upward, tracing the walking patterns of the men above her head.

She hears K-2SO’s voice more often than she hears Bodhi’s. She never hears Cassian’s.

*

When they drop out of hyperspace, she makes her way up the ladder, despite the ache in her muscles that remains. Cassian is stretched out on the floor of the deck, his eyes welded shut. Jyn’s body burns hot at the sight of him, her wrists and palms itching, but she is quick to turn away. Bodhi twitches when he hears her feet hit the floor, but he doesn’t turn around to look at her.

“Good morning,” he says, flicking a switch on the control console. “Are you you again?”

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t me,” Jyn replies. She sees the corner of Bodhi’s mouth twitch upward, an almost-smirk. Beside him, K-2SO’s optical sensors seem to roll.

“Memory loss,” he says, a staccato imitation of Baze. “You remember none of it?”

“The last I recall, we were walking through a pretty patchy area,” Jyn says with a shrug. She winces as one of the muscles in her back goes tight. “No locals, no wildlife.”

“Certainly plenty of flora,” K-2SO drawls. “You encountered a papaver-esque flower that induced a trance-like state of arousal. You and the captain fornicated and continued to do so until the guardians and I intervened.”

Silence fills the cabin.

Jyn does not flush. Jyn does not move. Jyn doesn’t breathe. She sees Bodhi glance backwards, assessing her sudden stillness. He is just as quick to look away.

“I see,” she says, at last. Her voice remains steady, if not slightly strained. It feels as though a hand has wrapped itself around her throat. The effort to keep her breaths even is monumental.

“Do you?” K-2SO asks. Never before has a droid sounded so deeply sarcastic. “Do you really?”

“I do,” Jyn says, nodding. “How much longer until we hit atmo, Rook?”

The tension in the cabin doesn’t break, but it does relax. Bodhi flicks another switch, then peers over at one of the ship’s many dials. “I’d say half an hour, maybe less,” he tells her.

“I’ll wake Cassian,” K-2SO says. He stands, ducking his head in order to keep it from hitting the ceiling. His optical sensors lock on Jyn for a long, horrible moment before he moves away.

Jyn reaches out and presses a hand to Bodhi’s shoulder. He doesn’t flinch when she touches him – he hasn’t for a while – but his surprise shows in the furrowing of his brow.

Jyn doesn’t say a word. She lets go, a moment later, and slips back below deck, just as K-2SO sinks down to shake Cassian awake.

Baze glances up at her as she makes her way down the ladder, sleep still heavy in his face. Chirrut tilts his head in her direction. Jyn settles heavily between the two of them. Her lungs feel as though they’ve been turned to stone.

It’s Chirrut who reaches out first. He takes her hand in his and squeezes.

Jyn doesn’t quite collapse at the touch, but it’s a near and dear thing. She squeezes back, then holds on for the half hour it takes for Bodhi to return them to Base One.

*

It takes her longer than she’d like to make her way off the ship. Still between Baze and Chirrut, Jyn makes her way down the gangplank. She can see General Draven in the distance, his mustard yellow coat an eyesore she’ll never get used to. Mon Mothma, white robed, is hovering a little further back. Between them all is a sea of pilots, recruits, and officers; a river made up of tan and orange.

K-2SO strolls past the party of three with Cassian at his side. Jyn keeps her gaze resolutely forward as they part the river. Cassian doesn’t look back at her. Neither does K-2SO.

Then Bodhi’s at Baze’s side. “Do we all have to go to debriefing?” he asks, pushing a strand of grease-thickened hair out of his face.

Jyn looks out into the crowd and catches Draven staring her down. “I will,” she says, her bones creaking. “And I don’t think it’ll be pretty.”

Chirrut brushes his shoulder against hers. Baze frowns at the sight of the general in the distance, but he doesn’t say a word.

Bodhi’s head tilts, his mouth drawn into a thin, sympathetic line. “I’ll get you caf from the mess,” he tells her, shoving his hands deep into his pilot’s pockets. “Lots of sugar.”

Jyn closes her eyes against the seizing of her heart in her chest. “You don’t have to do that,” she says, but Bodhi’s already walking a little faster.

“I know I don’t,” he calls back. He slips into the crowd of rebels as easily as a fish, his goggled head bobbling until it disappears amongst the rest.

Jyn shakes her head, listening as Chirrut chuckles at her side.

They approach the waiting Draven as a trio. The general’s arms are crossed over his chest; his body is angled towards the already waiting Cassian, though Jyn knows he’s watching her.

“Just Sergeant Erso, please,” he says. Jyn knows how sour the politeness must taste in his mouth; she smirks for just a second before schooling her face into neutrality. Chirrut’s warmth disappears from her side, though he claps a hand on her back as he goes. Baze gives her a nod, then steps away, following a few inches behind Chirrut as they move towards the barracks.

Draven watches them as they go, then brings a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Walk with me,” he orders, turning his back on both Cassian and Jyn. With a word, Cassian sends K-2SO away; the droid sniffs but complies.

Draven’s steps are louder than anything else in the hanger as Cassian and Jyn walk forward. The space between them has returned, Jyn notices – the same foot that was there on Shira, the same forced distance. She likes it about as much as she did before.

“Your pilot sent out an alert halfway through your mission,” Draven says, weaving past a troop of recruits. “‘Dangerous flora on Shira prevents it from being a suitable Rebel base’. He said the two of you would have more details as to the nature of this danger.”

Jyn doesn’t look at Cassian. Cassian doesn’t look at her. Draven glances backwards, as though to make sure they’re both still following behind him.

“Well?”

Jyn closes her eyes and lets out a sigh through her nose. The moment she opens her mouth to speak, however, Cassian’s voice fills the air.

“Shira is home to a papaver-esque flower that induces a trance-like state in those who get too near to it,” he says. The echo of K-2SO in his otherwise neutral voice grates against Jyn’s nerves. “Sergeant Erso and I both fell victim to its effects. Recovery from this state required the whole of the return trip.” She thinks she sees him bite his lip and has to keep herself from doing the same. “If the Rebellion were to settle on Shira,” he continues, “there would be a natural defense from approaching ground troops, but the benefit doesn’t seem to outweigh the cost.”

Draven weighs his words with a careful expression, his eyes narrowing. “When you say ‘trance-like’,” he says, and Jyn sees Cassian wince, “what do you mean, exactly?”

A splotch of color appears on Cassian’s throat, a warm red against his skin. Jyn looks away from him and focuses on Draven, killing any warmth fluttering inside of her. “The flowers were aphrodisiacs,” she says, words crisp and clear.

Draven nearly misses a step. The hand that’s dropped from the bridge of his nose moves to his temple, as though he’s fighting off a headache. For this moment, and this moment alone, Jyn nearly finds him relatable.

“I see,” is all the general says. “We’ll mark that down in the data archives and move on from there. There aren’t many botanists with us, at the moment, but if we sent a few to Shira, we could determine how far across the planet these flowers spread. It may yet be a suitable place for a base.”

“I’ll talk to Lieutenant Watney,” Cassian says. His voice has grown softer, if not less neutral. “He may have encountered something similar before.”

“Do that,” Draven says, nodding. He comes to a halt just before the entrance to the administration sector of the base, his heels clacking against metal and stone. “Sergeant Erso, you’re dismissed. Report at 0600 in the morning for new orders.”

“Yes, sir.” Jyn’s salute isn’t quite lazy, but informal enough that Draven rolls his eyes. He shoos her away as he turns, motioning for Cassian to follow on behind him.

Jyn allows herself a brief glance towards her captain. The redness in his throat hasn’t quite faded, but the tension in his shoulders and the furrow in his brow remain.

He doesn’t look at her.

Jyn turns away and walks back through the hanger. She fixes her gaze on the orange surface of Yavin hanging above her head and studies the storms swirling across its surface.

With every step, the rock that seems to have replaced her heart grows a little heavier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The flowers in question are based on the pink dawn poppy - aphrodisiacs, yes, but the ones on Earth are significantly less potent than the ones on Shira ;) Poppies generally, red or pink, are opiates, too; the effects of opiates don't necessarily include memory loss, but for the sake of this fic, the Shiran dawn poppies do cause memory distortion or loss. Amongst other things. 
> 
> 2\. Sorry not sorry about the Martian reference.
> 
> 3\. Jyn reads a lot like an amateur botanist in the front half of this fic. I'm attributing this to the education she likely received from Saw. One has to know how to survive in the galaxy; an unfamiliar plant is just as dangerous as an enemy with a blaster.
> 
> Let me know what you thought!


	3. Jyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jyn really thinks about what it is she wants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ....this was supposed to be a _oneshot_. There are four chapters now, because Cassian and Jyn decided that they wanted to pine over each other for a little while instead of just cooperating with me. I hope you find their shenanigans entertaining. XOXO

Night passes. Morning arrives.

Jyn reports to General Draven at 0600 and finds Captain Hizir Barbarossa waiting at his side. She lingers across a desk from both of them in one of the administrative side rooms – the burnished walls smells like sulfur, though she tries not to wrinkle her nose.

“Your mission will be straightforward reconnaissance,” Draven is saying, his voice still cracking with early morning exhaustion. “You’ll be tracking a party of Stormtroopers to Korphir and reporting back their numbers, mission, and their weapons outfit, if possible. It should be an in and out mission; two days away, at max.”

Hizir tilts his head, reaching up to stroke his red beard before nodding. “Easy enough,” he says.

Draven’s gaze snaps to Jyn. His eyes narrow as she wavers. “Problem, Sergeant?”

Sleep still weighs heavy in the back of Jyn’s head, but it isn’t the hour that draws her mouth into a frown. She crosses her arms over her chest without a word, staring down at the pad still blinking with her briefing.

The room fills with impatient silence.

Draven breaks first. He runs a hand through his thinning hair and pushes himself upright before pinning Jyn with a glare. “Rogue One is not being dismantled,” he tells her, though his tone is far from reassuring. “We need Captain Andor to undertake a…delicate mission that is outside of your clearance.”

Jyn’s frown grows deeper, but she forces her shoulders to go lax. One of the wrinkles in between Draven’s eyebrows smooths out at the sight.

“Bodhi’s still our pilot?” Jyn prompts.

The general shoots a glance in the direction of Hizir. The captain shrugs, a curious smile passing over his face. “I’ve no problem with the man.”

“Your mercenary friends are back in the wind, however,” Draven says.

Jyn nods at this. They don’t say goodbye anymore, Chirrut and Baze. Baze had pressed a slim, two channel comm device into her hands while she’d still been in medbay recovering from Scarif. When he and Chirrut had disappeared the next day, she’d known what it was for. It hangs on a thin chain around her neck, now, occasionally bumping into her kyber crystal whenever she moves too abruptly or runs too hard.

(That is to say, all the kriffing time.)

Draven, seemingly waiting for a response, seems to sag when she says nothing. “You’re dismissed, both of you,” he says, waving the two of them away. “You’re scheduled to depart at 0900 on a Class J cargo tanker. Sergeant Erso, I suggest you wake your pilot.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Her tone is too dry for Draven to take her seriously, but such is the nature of their exchanges. Jyn turns on her heel just in time to see Hizir shake his head, but there’s a ghost of a smile lurking over his features. He reaches out as though to pat her on the shoulder when they go to part ways, but pulls back just in time. Instead, he waves, then disappears down the administrative temple’s light-stuttered hallways.

The walk to Bodhi’s bunk doesn’t take long, but Jyn lingers, watching daylight take to Yavin IV’s surface. The air smells wet, rain-soaked and heavy. She doesn’t remember walking through drizzle upon coming back – the aches and pains of her body had sent her stumbling towards the barracks without so much a glance towards either Draven or Cassian after they’d dismissed her. Bodhi and his caf had appeared some several hours later and met her with her hair down and tangled, still wet from the ‘fresher. He’d all but shoved the drink into her hands before scrambling away, muttering nonsense and apologies under his breath.

Jyn shakes her head as she comes to settle in front of his quarters. She considers knocking, but her fingers are itching for something to do and her mind feels unsteady. Jyn shoots a brief glance up and down the barracks’ hallway. There’s a shift near the far end off towards her right, but it disappears as soon as she sees it.

Jyn narrows her eyes. She watches for a minute longer, maybe two, but the flickering doesn’t reappear.

Reassured, she sinks down to her knees. The control panel for the bunk’s automatic door is easy to override; it takes Jyn’s practiced hands less than half a minute to get the door to open.

Bodhi shoots upright as she steps inside, eyes wide. His hands don’t long for a weapon like hers do, but Jyn still finds herself freezing, watching him with a wary gaze. “It’s alright,” she says, bringing her hands up so he can see them. “It’s just me.”

Bodhi blinks at her for a moment, wrestling with sleep in order to process who she is. Jyn sees the moment it clicks for him; he closes his eyes and flops back down onto the bed with a drawn out groan.

“What’s happened?” he asks, pulling his pillow over his face.

“You’re piloting my next mission,” Jyn says. She hesitates, then takes a step forward. When Bodhi doesn’t flinch, she takes another. She keeps herself light as she sits down at the foot of his bed, watching for any signs of distress. There’s tension dancing through the calf nearest her, Jyn sees, but otherwise, Bodhi’s as calm as he ever gets.

“Wonderful,” comes the muffled response. “When are we going?”

“Two and a half hours from now,” Jyn says. “Reconnaissance. All you have to do is fly.”

There’s a laugh – or what Jyn thinks is a laugh – from beneath the pillow. She lets out a huff and rolls her eyes, even though the effect goes to waste.

Bodhi removes the pillow from his face and lifts himself up so he can settle on his elbows. His hair is nearly as long as hers, though there’s an awkward strand dividing his face in half. Jyn tilts her head as she looks at him, one corner of her mouth twitching upward.

“It’s not all of us,” Bodhi says, after a long moment. “Chirrut and Baze are already gone; I saw them off last night.”

“Cassian’s got other things to do.” She doesn’t know if she sounds bitter when she says it, but the look that flashes over Bodhi’s face reads…well. She’d call it amused, but she wants to think better of him than that.

He moves his weight over to his right arm and reaches out to pat her on the knee. Then, with a gentle shove, he kicks her off of his bed. Jyn goes stumbling forward with a chuckle and an eye roll.

“Ridiculous,” she thinks she hears Bodhi mutter. She doesn’t turn around to look at him while he changes from his night clothes, but she crosses her arms over her chest, anyway. If he sees the tension return to her shoulders, he doesn’t comment on it.

*

Their mission goes smoothly – too smoothly, if Jyn is to be asked, but no one questions her on her opinions when she debriefs, so she doesn’t share them. She’s spent three meaningless days trapped in small quarters with Bodhi and Hizir tracking an imperial cargo transport only to return with news of bacta shipments and increased ‘trooper numbers. It’s enough information to keep Draven happy for the next…six hours or so after their arrival, though, which makes it more than enough for Jyn.

Draven graces them all with critical looks when they report their data, but he dismisses them without any complaints. Jyn and Bodhi stay close to one another as the administrative halls give way to the open air. They both wave as Hizir drifts towards the hanger, his ginger head bobbing until, at last, it’s out of sight.

Their walk towards the barracks is a quiet one full of knocking shoulders and well-meaning smiles.

“Caf?” Bodhi asks, reaching up and stretching. His arms nearly brush the barracks’ ceiling as they enter; a bit of dust comes crumbling down onto Jyn’s head. She brushes it off and ignores the way he has to stifle a chuckle.

“I can get my own,” she tells him, offering up a smirk as she glances backwards. Outside the barracks, night is falling; dusk has settled like a blanket, and rebels are either moving inside or out towards the cantina that’s not supposed to exist. “You want anything, though?”

Bodhi shakes his head and stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets. They keep pace with one another as they head towards Bodhi’s bunk. Only when he’s come to a stop in front of it does Jyn look at him again.

His lips are cracking with dryness, but his mouth has fallen open. Jyn tilts her head, waiting, but only air comes out.

“Something wrong?”

Bodhi hesitates.

The thin threads that make up Jyn’s patience are a little thicker when it comes to Bodhi (when it comes to Rogue One, in general), but youthful suspicion has never and will never leave her. She waits and traces the ticks in Bodhi’s face: a repressed grimace, an aborted hand movement towards his temple, and a tightening of his mouth around the corners.

“Shira,” he says, at last. The word is awkward as it falls from his lips; it lands on the floor between them like a dead wompa rat.

Jyn feels her face slip into neutrality. Bodhi seems to see it, too, because his lips press even more tightly against one another.

“I know we joke,” he says, “Chirrut and Baze and I, and I know you don’t like the teasing, but – you remember what happened, yes?”

Jyn’s eyes narrow. “K-2SO gave a rather brusque description. I’ve worked out the rest of it.”

(She hasn’t, not exactly; memories come back in flashes. Her body knows what it feels like, now, to have Cassian above and below her; she knows, if she ever saw him bare chested again, that she could trace the scars and bruises that the Rebellion has left behind.)

“Of course,” Bodhi says with a nod. “And there hasn’t been much of a chance for the two of you to, you know, _talk_ about it –”

“He’s beyond me, at this point,” Jyn says, interrupting.

The dead tone of her words brings Bodhi to a halt. “Whadda you mean?”

“Rebel Intelligence,” Jyn says. “He can disappear for days and never see any of us again. If he wants to come back and talk about it, he can. I’m not going to chase him.” She tries not to shift as a lance pierces her through the heart. The more pragmatic Jyn Erso – the girl Saw Gerrara raised and abandoned – knows her statement to be fact. The Jyn Erso who escaped Scarif on nothing more than a broken leg and a dream is still bleeding from the inside out.

Bodhi makes no move to correct her, and it almost hurts more. “If you see him,” he says, voice gentler than before, “will you try and talk it out?”

The urge to close her eyes and turn away is almost overwhelming. Jyn studies the lines of Bodhi’s face, instead.

“Does it matter?” she asks, already knowing the answer.

Bodhi doesn’t bother to respond. He reaches out and brings his hand down onto Jyn’s shoulder. When she doesn’t move, he steps forward and rests his chin on the top of her head. Jyn does her best to glare up at him, but her arms come around his back, anyway, in their awkward, unbalanced hug.

“Ask the purple twi’lek – her name’s Chia – if she has something that’ll perk up your caf,” Bodhi says, pulling away. “I think you need it.”

“Are you saying I’m tense?” Jyn asks, eyes going wide with false annoyance.

Bodhi rolls his eyes at her as he keys the code for his bunk into the pad by the door. He waves at her as he steps inside, then turns away as the door slides shut.

Jyn stares after him for a long moment. Then, with a shake of her head, she makes her way out towards the mess.

*

Night on Base One is a strange, iridescent thing. Empty caf cup in hand (and Correlian brandy’s fire burning in her throat), Jyn shirks the call of curfew in favor of slipping onto the roof of the barracks to watch the sky take on the blue-orange of night. She watches as lights flicker on in the repurposed temples of the base and, for a moment, envies whatever electrician the Alliance shanghaied into working on such an extensive project. She imagines the electrician made a _lot_ of money off of that deal.

Unless, of course, they volunteered. Just like ninety percent of the other rebels on the damned base.

The bulk of Yavin takes up most of the night sky. Jyn picks cloud swirls out of its impossible mass and tracks them across the planet. If she closes her eyes, she can feel the wind pulling at her head scarf, at her jacket. If there is life on the planet (and there probably is, even if it is a gas giant), she wonders what form it would take. Are there gaseous salamanders skirting through the storms, plucking up microscopic meals from the wind and dust? Maybe there’s a species like the Annoo dot prime, large and reptilian, able to swim through gas like it’s the water on Naboo.

She’d traded with one of the Annoo, once, during an hour long stop on Coruscant. “Traded”, that is – she’d distracted him with tales of refined kyber crystal stashed in the back of one of the ships further down the dock, winked at him and offered him a reduced price, so long as he talked to her captain. He’d gone scurrying off, and she’d returned to her friends in Saw’s band, all of whom were busy commandeering the Annoo’s luxury cruiser for…rebellious purposes.

One of the storms of Yavin’s surface merges with another. Jyn winces, then leans back against the barrack’s roof, supporting herself on her elbows.

She doesn’t know how long she stays there, precisely, only marks the turn of Yavin with an idle eye. After some time, though, – long enough for her vision to adjust – she hears a rock go tumbling down the temple’s side. It’s nothing large, likely no bigger than a pebble under a misplaced boot, but she still goes tense. Her hand moves down towards her blaster, but she doesn’t pull it from its holster. Instead, she tucks herself into the shadows, small, discrete, and waits.

For a moment, there’s nothing. Then, a silhouette blocks out the orange of Yavin’s surface. Jyn sees unkempt hair, a familiar lilting stance, and hears a soft curse that she can’t quite understand. Her hand drops away from her blaster, but she keeps herself hidden in the darkness.

Cassian Andor lifts his head to peer up towards Yavin. After a heartbeat, maybe two, he settles down in the same spot Jyn had been sitting. He leans back, fingers weaving into the moss and loose stone of the temple, and lets out the galaxy’s softest sigh.

A long string of swears build up in Jyn’s throat, but she bites them back, grinding her molars against one another. There’s an ache in her chest as she stares outward, but she ignores it, opting instead to weigh her options. She’s not sure when he returned from his mission – she didn’t hear the burn of Rebel engines or the too-quiet Intelligence footsteps – but his presence is like an itch, like a boulder inside her chest that she has no way of eroding.

If she were careful – extremely careful, and quieter than she’s ever been in her life – she could slip down the opposite side of the barracks without Cassian ever hearing her. Alternatively, she could remain in this spot, stock still and barely breathing, until he grows bored, but Force knows how long that will take.

There is also, of course, the option of approaching him. Jyn bites her lip and holds in a sigh. The ache in her chest flares as Cassian shifts, joining with a sharp pang of fear. Jyn pulls deeper into the shadows and watches as the orange-blue of night dances over the man’s unguarded face.

The air between them is silent, save for the occasional call of a distant whisper bird. Cassian shifts again and brings a hand up to his face, as though rubbing sleep or stress from his eyes. In this moment of distraction, Jyn takes a hesitant step backwards.

“I know you’re there,” Cassian says. His voice is so soft that Jyn almost ignores him, nearly pretends that she doesn’t hear, but her frozen body gives her away. Cassian doesn’t turn around to look at her – it’s possible he doesn’t know who she is, but the lack of tension in his shoulders is so uncharacteristic that Jyn knows, in a moment, that the game is up.

She slips out of the shadows and back into the light. The fall of her body when she drops at Cassian’s side isn’t heavy, but rather obvious. She doesn’t look at his face as she makes herself comfortable. Instead, she peers past Yavin, out into the distant field of stars.

If he glances at her, she doesn’t notice. The rock of the temple is grainy beneath her fingers; she digs them in and waits for the silence between them to break.

It doesn’t.

Cassian’s clothes rustle as he shifts, following her gaze out into the stars. After several heartbeats of Jyn holding her breath, he sighs. One hand rises and waves out at the expanse, settling on four specks of light in particular.

“My sister, Camila,” he says, “used to call that grouping the Melting Pot. Atorra is there – with the Eden colony – right in the middle of a big broth of stars.”

Jyn lets out her breath in a slow hum.

“We’d play a game,” Cassian continues, “and ask her ‘what is in the pot today?’ She’d go on tangents for hours, if we’d let her, about what kind of stew the galaxy was making and how good it would taste when we finally had the chance to sit down and eat.”

The huff of laughter that escapes Jyn’s lips surprises her. She glances over and sees some of the worry lines in Cassian’s brow begin to smooth.  

The silence resumes, after that, but it doesn’t pick at Jyn’s skin. She settles in and traces the outline of the Melting Pot, mentally cataloguing the other planets she knows to be in that sector. Cassian shifts again, but if he looks at her, Jyn can’t tell.

“Saw made me memorize the names of the planets of whatever sector we were in starting when I was eight,” she says, after a while. “He’d test me – if I got a certain number correct, he’d let me take his blaster and shoot with the rest of the partisans during training.”

“And if you got too many wrong?”

Jyn didn’t bother to hide her grimace. “No blaster. No hand to hand training. More time spent with the data pads.”

She thinks she sees Cassian’s eyebrow quirk upward. “Sounds like quite the education.”

“I learned quickly,” Jyn says, shrugging. “Not just the planets, either – plants, animals, alien languages – have I ever told you,” she asks, shaking her head, “about my time in the Coruscant Underworld? I was twelve, maybe younger, but Saw had business and didn’t want to leave me back at our base. He left me at the local cantina and pointed out three men I was supposed to rob while he was talking to his contact. None of them spoke Standard.”

“And you succeeded?”

“Of course I succeeded.” There’s no swagger to her voice when she says it, no false offense, just simple truth.

Cassian’s gaze lingers on her for a heartbeat longer. Then, he looks away, shaking his head. When Jyn glances over at him, she catches a glimpse of a smile in the orange light of Yavin.

Their hands, spread out behind them on the barrack roof’s worn down stone, never quite touch. Jyn stiffens, all the same, when she feels the warmth of Cassian’s pinky brush against hers.

He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t flinch or go tense. She thinks she sees his eyes slip closed, though, and hears the gentle release of a sigh.

“The scars on your stomach,” he says, “did you get those while you were with Saw?”

Jyn opens her mouth, something dark settling in the back of her throat. Before it leaves, however, she catches it and forces it back down. “No,” she says, once the silence has stretched on for too long. “I got those afterwards.”

Cassian hums. He shuffles, pulling his hand away from hers in favor of lifting up the hem of his shirt. Jyn looks over in time for him to reveal a long, white scar running up his left side, stopping just above his hip but tracing all the way up to his armpit.

“Fight with an Ssi-ruu on Lwhekk,” he says. The shirt drops, a moment later. Jyn forces herself to look back up towards Cassian’s face.

He studies her in return, head tilted ever so slightly to the side. There’s a question, Jyn thinks, lingering in the shadows of his gaze, but the words never leave his mouth.

His hand returns to the rock of the roof, a little closer to hers than it had been before. Jyn doesn’t look at it. She doesn’t look at him.

Their pinkies brush again.

*

He walks her back down to the barracks after the heartbeats in their silences become too much to bear. Their shoulders bump as they go. Jyn doesn’t flinch as the brush of his warmth against her own (there are flashes, instead, of the press of him above her, of his touch _burning_ her, but she does the best to put these out of her mind).

Her door appears first. Her roommate is off planet, so she doesn’t bother staying quiet as she keys open the door. Cassian lingers behind her in the hall, his boots hovering an inch beyond the room’s threshold.

“Jyn,” he says. It’s a quiet thing, but it still brings her up short, stilling her as she goes to toe off her boots.

Jyn glances backwards and finds Cassian backlit by the lights in the barracks’ hall. She blinks, trying to clear spots out of her vision in order to better see the lines of his face. “Yes?”

Something sleepy stirs to life in the depths of her belly, something ashy: an untended fire. Jyn shifts and grits her teeth; she doesn’t let herself curl her hands into fists, just watches Cassian’s face as he studies her, in return.

What a pair they make. Her hands burn with the need to reach out and touch him, but she holds. Jyn breathes, and she holds.

Cassian’s mouth falls open, as though there are words – somewhere, stuck, maybe, to the back of his throat. He closes it, a moment later, and shakes his head. The toes of his boots never pass Jyn’s threshold.

“Goodnight,” he says, pushing away from her door.

Jyn watches as he walks away, stares until her door slides shut of its own accord. The fire in her stomach roars, all consuming, and a whimper escapes her. She closes her eyes and thanks the Force that there’s no one there to hear it.

She falls down onto her cot, some precious minutes later, unclothed save for a long shirt that smells like sweat and dirt and – not her (Cassian hasn’t noticed it missing yet; she’s had it since before Shira, and he’s yet to comment). A hand drifts down in between her thighs, beneath the shirt, and presses against the wetness that’s begun to settle there. Jyn sucks in a breath from between her teeth and lets her eyes fall shut.

She doesn’t have to wonder whether or not Cassian would be a good lover – she knows the patterns his tongue makes, the press of his kiss against her mouth, the growls that she can rip from his throat with a touch, with a twitch of her hips. Jyn presses her hand against her clit and whimpers again; the brush of Cassian’s shirt against her nipples makes her dizzy. The smell of him makes her _want_.

She trades a fingertip for a knuckle and grinds against herself. The hand not otherwise occupied moves up to her breast and pinches one stiffened nipple. Jyn swears and can see, for a moment, a flush of dark hair hovering above her. She can feel the brush of a cock against her slit; knows the taste of Cassian on her tongue.

Her orgasm comes on her quickly, too quickly, and leaves her shaking in its wake. The noises she makes are mindless; she arches off of her cot when she comes and only settles her hips when the waves have washed over her completely, leaving her thoughtless and free.

She wipes her fingers on her sheets instead of the shirt. It’s the last thing she manages to do before sleep comes to claim her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent an absurdly long time on Wookiepedia looking up information for this chapter. Little Easter eggs (I suppose): Hizir is actually the name a notorious, ginger pirate. There is an agricultural colony on the planet Atorra; I called it the Eden colony because EU canon claims that Atorra is an otherwise barren planet, save for this one spot of agricultural growth.
> 
> Let me know what you thought!


	4. Cassian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Commitment is a foreign word to those who grow up in isolation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have a Cassian POV as this one-shot continues to grow uncontrollably.

Shira comes back to him in pieces.

Draven ships him off to Utapau, where he spends two long nights tucked away in the corner of a sand-bitten cantina waiting for the arrival of a contact who only shows on his last night in the quadrant. In between nights lit up by at least three of Utapau’s nine moons, Cassian sleeps. The too-small transport he shares with K-2SO makes his skin itch, but he’s learned to fold himself into the co-pilot’s seat and doze whenever the droid goes quiet for a few minutes. The half-rests he gets leave the world a little…fuzzy, when he wakes.

The dreams of Shira are always tinted with a pink haze. Cassian’s hands brush over flower petals that give off no smell, but they’re not at all important. He fixes on the small form in front of him as it flickers in and out of view. Jyn’s tense shoulders soften with every step she takes into the jungle; her stern face, normally lined with stress, smooths until she’s almost unrecognizable.

“Kay,” Cassian says, halfway through the second day, a touch of pink still lingering around his gaze. “I’m assuming you submitted a status report after our return from Shira.”

“Of course I did.” He’s still not sure if offense is programmed into all Imperial security droids or if he just got lucky. “You were incapacitated, Sergeant Rook’s methods were unsuitable for the situation at hand, Sergeant Erso was detained, and neither of the Guardians were properly trained. _One_ of us had to be responsible.”

Cassian shakes his head, not bothering to hide the small smile that flickers across his features. “Send the report to my pad,” he says, punching on a “please” as he leans back in the co-pilot’s seat. K-2SO, one hand buried in the ship’s comm system, turns to look at him, but Cassian doesn’t bother to look back.

“I can do that,” K-2SO says, after the silence has gone on for too long. “But you won’t find what you’re looking for.”

“And how do you know what I’m looking for?”

“You’re looking for information about what occurred between yourself and Sergeant Erso.” The rank before Jyn’s name tugs Cassian’s lips down, if only a little. “My data on that encounter is limited to an assessment of Shira’s infectious foliage, life signs as determined in the grove, and a transcription of the retrieval encounter.”

“All of that is fine,” Cassian says, waving a hand. “Send it over. My memory is patchy, and I don’t enjoy not knowing the full story.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” K-2SO’s voice carries too much to be considered a mutter, but the intent comes across, all the same. Cassian doesn’t quite roll his eyes; the grumbling of his droid is all too familiar. Instead, he leans back in the co-pilot’s chair and reaches for his pad. By the time he’s righted himself, the mission report is waiting for him to open, as are several data charts and a document full of text.

He doesn’t take it with him when he goes out, that night, but he manages to read a few lines just as the sun begins to rise. The words swim into one another, technical jargon intermixing with “arousal”, “hormones”, and “aphrodisiac”. Cassian finds his hands curling around the sides of his pad with unusual force and has to tuck the thing away before the metal begins to bend.

He’s managed to read halfway through the report by the time word comes about the destruction of Alderaan.

He and K-2SO return to Yavin IV and find it desolate, sagging under the weight of such tremendous loss. Cassian tries to straighten himself up as he steps off the transport’s gangplank (his hair is getting too long, just brushing the back of his neck). When he looks back to K-2SO, the droid has settled himself into the ship, ready to power down for the night.

“You’re not coming?” he asks.

K-2SO’s optical sensors blink, dim in the orange-blue of night. “Your sleep will not be aided by my presence,” he says. “Nor will your debrief. I will see you in the morning, Cassian.”

Cassian lets out a huff as he turns away.

He passes a few rebels as he goes, some on perimeter patrol, others…not. Curfew has long passed for the base’s residents; Cassian’s late arrival excuses him from any punishment, but the tree line shivers with unpracticed stealth, and he hears muffled conversation as he walks on by.

Draven, alerted some thirty minutes before the transport broke atmo, is waiting in the empty war room when Cassian arrives. The general’s coat has been abandoned on one of the chairs next to him, and his hair, usually well-kept, seems to have fallen flat. Cassian considers him as he takes his final steps forward, then snaps a sharp salute.

“At ease, Captain Andor,” Draven says. Even his voice has drawn up, tighter and more tired than Cassian’s ever heard it before. “Let’s keep this brief, shall we?”

“Of course, sir.”

The report is tense but necessary. One of Cassian’s contacts reports movement within the Empire. No one is moving towards Shira or any other planets the Rebellion is considering as a second home; attention is focusing, rather, on Yavin IV itself. Draven’s shoulders sag with the news. Cassian watches as new lines appear around his eyes; the general brings a hand up and runs it across his face.

“You’ve confirmed some of the Council’s fears, I’m afraid,” he says, after Cassian’s report has concluded. “After Alderaan and Princess Leia’s capture –” Cassian’s hands curl into fists “– the Council agreed that Yavin IV has been compromised.” Draven shakes his head. “Shira won’t be an option until it’s been investigated further; right now, our best option appears to be Hoth. You’ll be heading there tomorrow as part of the first evacuation wave.”

Only years of practice keep the stress out of Cassian’s brow. He remains silence as Draven continues.

“You’ll report to General Cracken until I arrive on base,” Draven continues. He studies Cassian’s face for a long moment, as though searching for some sort of response.

Cassian gives him none.

“I take it I’ve made myself clear,” Draven says, once the moment’s stretched into discomfort.

“Yes, sir.” Cassian’s heels come together as he salutes again. Draven continues to watch him, eyes growing tight at the corners. Satisfied – or perhaps resigned – he turns away, dismissing the captain with a wave of his hand.

“Your transport leaves at 0700,” he says as he begins to walk away. “Don’t tell anyone where you’re headed. We don’t want to be spreading panic around the base.”

Cassian grits his teeth but nods, all the same. His salute drops, but he remains in the war room, watching Draven’s back until the general disappears.

The moment he’s alone, Cassian sags.

He lets himself linger for a minute, maybe two, before gathering himself, rolling his aching shoulders as he goes. Silence is a familiar friend of his, but it aches, barring his tongue like a bit in a pulga’s mouth.

Cassian’s walk out of the war room is a quiet one, nonetheless. His boots make no noise against the well-worn temple stone. Seniority provides him with a single bunk in the rebel complex, but Cassian doesn’t go to it.

The barracks are just beginning to go dark when he starts to climb onto the roof.

The stars above his head are bare boned things, too distant to offer any comfort. Cassian climbs as high as he is able, then sits down on the edge of the roof. He runs a hand over his face and sighs, stretching out his legs so they dangle down and tap against the side of the barrack’s wall.

He knows he’s not alone. The rabbit-fear radiating off of his companion would have been enough for him to hold his silence, but the ache in his bones, his jaw, and the bit against his tongue make talking seem…unnecessary. Still, he sits, ears pricked. While he keeps his eyes fixed on the night sky, he listens backwards, cataloguing the gentle intakes of breath, the shifting of weight, and the consideration of the person behind him.

They linger for so long, and so quietly, that Cassian dismisses the idea that this is a new recruit wandering in the dark. The measure of their breaths are controlled – a practiced soldier, then, maybe even Intelligence. Only when a foot shifts, displaying a wayward pebble, does he make to look backwards at all.

“I know you’re there,” he says, careful to keep his voice soft.

The shadows are too dark for him to see through, but he hears his companion shift. Cassian turns his gaze back towards the stars as they emerge. His palms itch; his throat closes against the idea of small talk, but he readies himself for it, all the same.

Then Jyn Erso drops down beside him.

Cassian’s eyes don’t go wide, but the tightness wrapped around his throat loosens, just a little. He glances towards her as subtly as he can and takes in the begrudging curve of her mouth. She’s not smiling, but she doesn’t look disappointed, either.

They don’t talk much. When the silence between them begins to weigh too heavily, he tells her a story. The gift she gives him in return makes something curl in on itself in his stomach, but Cassian soldiers through it. A laugh nearly falls out of him, imagining young Jyn Erso with Saw Gerrara’s oversized blaster. Another part of him sees himself handling weapons at a too-young age, and the similarity keeps him quiet.

He studies her face in between their tales. She’s relaxed – not too relaxed (he can’t imagine Alderaan weighing on her, the anger she must radiate with in the light of day), but the wariness in her eyes has settled, if only a little. She has new bruises, he can tell – she favors her right side as they sit, trying to take weight away from her left.

When her pinky brushes his – an accident, just an accident – the monster in his stomach lets out a low growl. The world stutters pink, and a pit of guilt opens up beside the burning Cassian’s long grown used to.

“The scars on your stomach,” his traitorous mouth says – an acknowledgement of the thing they refuse to discuss – “did you get those while you were with Saw?”

(He remembers tracing them with his tongue, pressing kisses against raised skin as though he could wipe Jyn clean. If she raised her shirt, he thinks he could do it again; the memories his body keeps are stronger than the ones in his head, and their bodies are familiar with each other, now, even if their minds aren’t.)

“No,” Jyn says, tension returning to her jaw. He thinks it’ll be all she says, in the silence that follows, but the orange-blue light of Yavin renders her…softer, if only for a moment. “I got those afterwards.”

Cassian hums. His hands, before he can stop them, are pulling up his tan fatigue shirt. He watches Jyn’s eyes light at the sight of the scar along his side; there’s a familiarity there, though she’s quick to squash it.

“Fight with a Ssi-ruu on Lwhekk,” he tells her (and he remembers the feel of her hand, running up his side. She hadn’t kissed it, had only grazed it, but he knows that she knows it.)

It’s not a concession. It’s not a surrender. It’s…tentative acknowledgement. It takes Jyn a second too long to look up at his face again, too, so Cassian fights back a smile and takes what he can get.

Their pinkies brush again. He tries not to grow hopeful.

*

He nearly stumbles over the threshold of her bunk. The sight of her, small in the darkness, shrinking as she pulls away from him, sets something in the center of his chest alight while simultaneously threatening to pull it out. Her name falls off of his lips like a hot coal; it burns his feet when it lands and makes him shift, suddenly uncomfortable.

She’s bathed in light from the hall when she turns. Her head tilts, and Cassian sees a strand of hair fall out of her tight bun, lingering.

(Pink, pink, and the world is going sideways; she’s above him, under him, looking up at him with eyes wide with trust and need and _wants_ –)

The words are there, in the back of his throat – _get on a ship, get out of here, run while there’s still time_ – but they stick, thick with the warning look Draven had given him and with loyalty that’s been driven in bone deep. Beneath that, too, is the burning coal at his feet; it sparks when Jyn blinks, a small smile trickling up the corner of her face.

Cassian wants to reach out and grab her, hold her to him, never let her go. Instead, he keeps his boots firmly in the light of the barracks’ hall.

“Goodnight.”

He turns before he can see her face fall. The hall lights sting his eyes, but he bears it. He keeps his pace brisk as he walks away; his ears twitch when he hears the slide of Jyn’s door as it shuts, but he does not allow himself to look back. His hands form into fists at his sides.

Light is due to return to the moon in less than two hours. Cassian glances at a chrono he passes by and swears. He has to retrieve K-2SO, gather his things, make his way down to the hanger. The crew bound for Hoth is likely already stirring in their bunks. He has an hour to himself, at best, before someone will come looking for him.

Not a lot of time to sleep. Even less time to dream. Cassian drags a hand over his face and sighs.

In the hour he has, he steps in and out of the ‘fresher. He gathers up the shirts he keeps in his bunk (one fewer than he’d originally been given – probably damaged beyond repair) and tucks them away along with the rest of his clothes. He sends off a message to Bodhi, short and apologetic, bylined with “I’ll see you soon”, even though his stomach sinks while typing the words. He has no way of contacting Baze or Chirrut, though he knows that, if they wanted to, they could get in touch with him.

His fingers hover over Jyn’s name in his contacts file. Her own pad goes relatively unused; he’s not once seen her check it when they’ve been on their missions together. More often than not, she’d read the mission briefings by looking over his shoulder, her hand on the top of the pilot’s chair as she leaned down, her hair gently grazing Cassian’s cheek.

His pit of guilt hums. The monster in his chest seizes. Cassian closes his eyes and tucks his pad in between his pile of shirts.

There will be no goodbyes, not between him and Jyn Erso. He’d welcomed her home, once before. He won’t be the one to deny it to her. He’ll see her again soon enough, anyway.

He doesn’t look back when he boards the transport, half an hour later. The faces next to his are vaguely familiar – Intelligence, a medic or two, and K-2SO, tucked into a corner and pouting. Cassian settles in next to him and watches as an unfamiliar pilot readies them for takeoff.

“This mission is slated as ‘need to know’ only,” K-2SO says. He’s reduced the volume of his voice in the relatively cramped space, but it still rings against the ship’s metal siding.

Cassian waits for him to continue. When the droid doesn’t, he glances upward. “And?”

K-2SO studies him, tilting his head, even though he doesn’t need to. “Your lack of response suggests that you have not told the Rogue One crew,” he says.

Cassian’s nod is too sharp; a pain blooms out of his neck and makes his scowl all the worse for it.

There is no functional reason for K-2SO’s optical sensors to narrow, but the light shining out of them dims for a moment. “Jyn Erso will not be pleased when she finds you missing,” he says. “Neither will Bodhi Rook, but there is an eighty eight percent chance that he will only express disappointment. There is a ninety six percent chance, comparatively, that Jyn Erso will express her displeasure through rage.”

Cassian closes his eyes. He doesn’t laugh at the statement, as correct as it is, but it tugs at him in a way that is almost funny. “I have orders,” he says, a moment later. “I can’t break them. Not even for my team.”

“You’ve broken them before,” K-2SO reminds him.

One of the medics glances their way and hides a half-amused smile. Cassian, eyes open once more, lifts an eyebrow at him and crosses his arms over his chest.

When he doesn’t respond, K-2SO looks away.

His guilt doesn’t abate once the ship’s freed from atmo. It burns, singeing his fingertips and leaving ash in his mouth where there were once pink flowers.

*

He hears about the attack on Yavin IV while he’s knee deep in snow, a pick axe in hand. The ice tunnels on Hoth go on for circular miles, and even some of the illustrious Intelligence officers have been ordered to extend them. Cassian, two days in between missions, does what he can, all the while listening to K-2SO grumbling at his side.

Only when the droid stiffens do Cassian’s gloved hands fall still. There’s a flickering of K-2SO’s optical sensors, and then:

“The base on Yavin IV is under attack.”

No eyebrow twitches with surprise. No mouth falls open in shock. Rather, Cassian’s lips thin to a line, and he sets his pick axe aside. K-2SO doesn’t comment on his increased heartrate, so Cassian proceeds as though he’s not falling into a panic. “How many ships made it off of the base?”

“The radio chatter is cluttered.” K-2SO tilts his head, listening for something Cassian can’t hear. In his momentary silence, Cassian thanks the Force – or whatever omniscient deity is listening – that he extended the droid’s scanner range.

“There were three other transports that departed on the same day we did, but seven returned before the cycle on Yavin IV ended,” K-2SO reports, at last. “Bodhi Rook has just signed on with the Rogue Squadron. Apparently he’s going to be flying under a Luke Skywalker in an attempt to destroy the Stormtrooper transports that landed three clicks north of the base.”

Cassian doesn’t swear. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. “What about Jyn?”

K-2SO shifts his stance again. “The most recent transport records do not include Jyn Erso on their rosters. There is a ninety two percent likelihood that she is still on Yavin IV.”

Cassian closes his eyes.

He doesn’t go back to digging. His pick axe remains abandoned in a half finished hallway as he storms past K-2SO. The droid follows behind, head jolting every now and then. He rambles off whatever white noise he can catch, but little of it makes sense, and the distance, despite Cassian’s modifications, is frequently too great.

Hoth’s carved out hanger is full of rebels mulling about, huddling close to one another or around comms spewing off as much nonsense as K-2SO. Cassian passes them by without so much as a glance. He catches sight of General Cracken’s white hooded coat and pursues her, reaching out to tap her on the shoulder just before she disappears down one of Hoth’s many hallways.

“General Draven required me to report to you,” he says before she has a chance to speak. “I can be of more use to you in your war room than in the halls.”

General Cracken narrows her bright, blue eyes. Behind her, an aid chirps in a language Cassian doesn’t understand. He doesn’t glower. He keeps his gaze locked on the general’s, waiting for her assessment.

It takes her far too long to nod her consent. Cassian’s pace, when he falls in beside her, chafes, but he lets K-2SO do his grumbling for him.

There is little to be done at such a distance from the fleet, especially given the secretive nature of the base on Hoth. Cassian finds himself next to K-2SO and a few other Intelligence officers, scribbling down whatever movements he can make out of the noise the Rebellion’s scanners manage to catch. They establish a movement board, holographic and material in nature, and watch the battle play out in miniature.

It’s K-2SO would reports the development of an Imperial blockade first. It’s an ensign – Cassian doesn’t know her name, but her voice echoes off of Hoth’s frozen walls – who reports the arrival of the Death Star on Yavin IV’s green horizon.

The ash in Cassian’s mouth threatens to choke him. In between figures and the screams of fighter pilots, he mutters to himself, apologies and names that no one besides K-2SO can recognize. When these, too, devolve, he’s left with nothing save for Chirrut’s chant. It feels hollow, falling off of his lips, but Cassian pins up a picture of Jyn in his mind and keeps repeating it, anyway.

*

The Death Star explodes. Bodhi arrives with the first wave of Rebels freed of the blockade. Cassian is waiting in the hanger, the hood of his jacket raised, when he sees the pilot stumbling away from his X-wing. He doesn’t quite run forward to embrace the man, but his steps are hurried. Bodhi turns and sees him two seconds before Cassian collides with him.

“Captain!” He sounds winded, though Cassian can’t fathom why. He pulls back before Bodhi can properly return the hug and checks the other man over, eyes moving carefully over his dark skin.

Bodhi laughs at him, but it’s a gentle, nervous thing. “I’m fine, Cassian,” he says, dropping Cassian’s title in the snow where it belongs. “Skywalker’s a good man to fly under.”

“I’m sure he is.” Cassian had been in the room when the farm boy had set the planet killer ablaze. He’s never met the kid, but he suspects that it’ll be nice to have a name bigger than his own wandering around the base. Fame makes it difficult to fade into the shadows.

Jyn’s name is heavy on his tongue, but Bodhi beats him to the punch. “Jyn was on the ground with a blaster in her hand while I was sky bound,” he says. The words come out of him in pieces; when Cassian looks down, it’s to see the other man’s hands shaking. “I didn’t see her before I came this way, but I was only docked for an hour, maybe less.”

The cold of Hoth smothers any fire still burning in Cassian’s belly. His hands fall to his sides, limp. He takes care to turn away from Bodhi slowly; the pilot reaches out, as though to clap him on the shoulder, but seems to think better of it.

“I’m sure she’s okay,” he calls as Cassian begins to walk away. “She’s our Jyn! She can survive anything!”

His voice shakes as much as his hands, but Cassian’s not going to be the man who tells Bodhi that he’s a terrible liar.

K-2SO is waiting near the hanger’s opening, staring out into the wasteland of snow and ice. Cassian comes to his side and stands, arms crossed. “How many ships are due for arrival?” he asks a passing pilot. The orange of the pilot’s jumpsuit is ripped, but she doesn’t seem to have noticed yet.

“Half of the X-wing fleet was destroyed; most of us are here already,” she says. “The Council is coming by transport, along with some of the ground troops.”

“How many?” Cassian asks again.

The ensign bites her lip and considers. “Five, I think,” she says, at last. Cassian watches as some of the relief drains out of her face. “The bucketheads came up on the base from behind. I was already in the air when the perimeter was breached.”

He doesn’t know how he manages to keep his breathing steady, but Cassian does. He thanks the ensign and turns away, casting his gaze back out to the too-white sky.

He and K-2SO stand in quiet for some time. Several more X-wings fly into the hanger; a transport arrives, and Cassian hears cheers as Senator Mon Mothma exits, looking frazzled yet unharmed.

“There is a forty eight percent chance that Jyn Erso survived,” K-2SO informs him. The words come without fanfare and hover between them.

The lump in Cassian’s throat does not disappear, but he manages to cough and respond, anyway. “That seems a bit low.”

“Jyn Erso is known for her reckless behavior,” K-2SO says. “If properly motivated, it is likely that she would have thrown herself into danger if only for the sake of others. She is less likely to endanger herself for someone who is not Bodhi Rook, Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus, you, or myself, but such behavior does appear to fit into her repertoire.”

Cassian closes his eyes.

*

All remaining Resistance ships arrive in the hanger before night falls on Hoth. Cassian retreats to his quarters as the world turns an icy blue; the lack of orange glow throws him off whenever he glances upwards, but the sky is quick to disappear from sight. He throws himself down onto a regulation cot and focuses on his breathing as he stares up at the ceiling.

(The world isn’t pink, when he imagines taking Jyn Erso in his arms. The world is softer, maybe green, and everything smells warm and a bit damp. They lay in the grass beside one another, collecting stars out of the night sky. She’s pressed up against his side; his nose is buried in her hair. They breathe together, exchanging gentle kisses as the night around them grows deeper.

Maybe she rolls on top of him. Maybe he hovers over her. It doesn’t matter, because she’s warm and vibrant and _alive_ beside him, reaching up to tangle her hands in his hair. When he pulls away, he can look at her through clear eyes, and that’s what matters most – they’re aware of what they’re doing, they know who they are, and when he kisses her, he tastes gunpowder and steel and the earthiness of _her_.)

Bodhi has not sought him out since his arrival in the hanger; last Cassian saw, he’d been swept up by Rogue Squadron and was drinking something vile out of an unfamiliar flask. Baze and Chirrut have not been in contact; he’s checked his pad nearly five times, all without result. K-2SO, sympathetic in his own way, has not followed Cassian to his quarters.

Cassian counts out his heartbeats and thinks, for a moment, of the white light of Scarif. There are scars on his chest from shrapnel, and his leg will forever hurt when the humidity changes. There are bonds, though, wrapped tight around his neck like thick red ribbons, all shooting out in separate directions. Four of them hold tight, far stretched and certain. The fifth –

Cassian grits his teeth and fights back a pained, animal noise that wells up in his throat.

He’s forced his eyes shut and his back against the cold wall when he hears the door to his quarters slide open. No one knows the key code to the room except for him (and whatever sorry sap electrician the Rebellion has on call). He’s reaching for his abandoned blaster before he’s opened his eyes.

His hand is just as quickly knocked back onto his chest. There’s a weight on his bed, and Cassian blinks into the darkness, trying to make out the details of the face that’s hovering above his.

Jyn Erso has looked so frightfully livid…twice, since Cassian’s met her. She reaches out and presses a hand to Cassian’s throat. Clever fingers first seek out his pulse, two outstretched and gentle. Then, her whole hand wraps around and squeezes.

“What. Did you think. You were doing?” she asks, voice too light and sweet for the Erso he knows. Cassian opens his mouth to respond, but Jyn squeezes all the tighter. “You left me,” she says, her voice an open wound. “I thought you were still on the base when the ‘troopers arrived. I looked _everywhere_ for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Cassian rasps, a broken, dead thing.

“No, you’re not,” Jyn hisses. Black dots begin to swim in front of Cassian’s eyes; he tries to gasp for air and finds it nigh impossible. Still, his hands remain on his cot, wrapped around the thin blanket the Rebellion has provided. “If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have left in the first place. You would have _said something_.”

With this, Jyn lets go. Cassian gasps and lets his hands go loose on the blanket.

“I had orders,” he manages. “I couldn’t have brought you with me, regardless.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered whether or not I wanted to go with you,” Jyn replies. “It mattered that I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were safe.”

“I was worried about you, too!”

“But you knew where I was!” Her voice cracks and threatens to send the ice walls around them crumbling. Cassian looks at her face, really looks at her, and catches a glimpse of tears in her eyes before she looks away. It’s her turn to grasp at his sheets, now, and she does, pulling them away from the bulk of his lower body.

He doesn’t reach out to touch her. He doesn’t say a thing. Cassian lets his head fall back onto his pillow and grimaces. He counts the breaths Jyn lets out, measuring the time between each. She doesn’t sob, his Jyn. She doesn’t demand explanations. She sits, righteous fury and hurt, and she burns.

“I know what war is, Cassian,” she says, after the silence drags on for too long. “I know what it takes. I’m not the one pushing people away this time, though.”

“That is a lie.” The words leave Cassian like he’s been stabbed, like his last gasp of air. There is not argument in them, however, and even as Jyn turns to look at him, offended, Cassian’s temperament holds. “We both do it,” he says, bringing a hand up to stop her scolding. “You know it, Jyn. We both do this.”

Her eyes narrow, but she doesn’t argue it. Instead, she looks away from him again.

It almost hurts, having her gaze fixed so intensely on the wall opposite him, but Cassian bears it with gritted teeth. He pushes himself up on his elbows, his calf brushing Jyn’s lower back as he goes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you where I was,” he says, a half-apology, but not a lie. “I’m sorry I didn’t say that I was going.”

There’s more to it than that, and they both know it, but he binds his lips before he can say anything else.

Jyn doesn’t accept his apology.

She keeps her back to him, keeps her gaze locked on the far wall. Cassian shifts again and feels the warmth of her radiating through the room, threatening to leave burns on his skin where they’re too close to one another. He doesn’t add distance, however. He stays as close as she’ll let him without crossing her boundaries, waiting, watching, counting the heartbeats that fill up the silence between them.

When Jyn finally sags, it’s like the world starts to spin again. She brings a hand up to the hair that’s fallen out of her bun and pushes it to the side. Cassian watches her, his breath still held.

“You need to tell me goodbye, Cassian,” Jyn says, at last. “I know – I know there’s – _things_ , and I know that makes it complicated, but if you’re going…” she trails off and sends a glance his way. It’s too quick for him to make sense of; by the time her gaze is back on the ice wall, her expression has smoothed out. “If you’re going to go,” she says again, “then you need to tell me. I’d rather know that you were gone then wait for you like some – some holovid princess.”

He nearly laughs at that. An image of Princess Leia flashes through his mind, her small stance strong and firm. Cassian’s smirk dies, at that, and he schools his expression.

When he reaches out, his fingers brush against Jyn’s sleeve. He frowns, a moment later, at the familiarity of the texture. His hand settles on her arm and squeezes, ever so gently.

“That’s my shirt,” he says, surprise coloring his voice.

It’s too dark to see whether or not Jyn flushes, and he’d pay all the credits the Rebellion owes him in order to see if she does. She pulls her arm away, but it’s a gentle thing. “What’s your point?” she grumbles.

He can’t stop his smile, this time, but he does his best to keep it brief. Cassian hauls himself the rest of the way upright and scoots further into Jyn’s space. She doesn’t move, only sharpens the glare she’s sending towards the wall.

She doesn’t flinch when he touches her again. Cassian settles his chin on Jyn’s shoulder and closes his eyes, settling his breathing in time with hers.

It takes a moment, maybe two, but he feels her hand come up to touch his own.

“I can’t promise that I’ll always be around,” he says, a whisper that feels too honest.

“I’m not asking you to,” Jyn replies. “I don’t expect you to be.”

It hurts more than he thought it would, but Cassian doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t see the way Jyn’s face pulls tight in an aborted sob, but he clings all the tighter.

“I’ll say goodbye,” he says, burying his face in the shirt she’s stolen. “But I’m not leaving you.”

The words are muffled by familiar fabric, and he’s not entirely sure if she hears them. She doesn’t respond, at first. The hand on his tightens, just a little. Then, it drops away.

Cassian feels another hole open up in his chest as Jyn pulls away. She turns, not rising from the bed, and looks at him, tracing out his features in the darkness of the room. Cassian looks back and sees the moment something clicks behind her eyes.

He doesn’t stop her as she leans forward.

The world shivers as Jyn Erso kisses him, just a gentle press of her lips against his. He follows her when she pulls away, leaning into cold air before coming back to himself. He catches the hint of a smile on her lips when he opens his eyes, but it’s a passing thing. Jyn’s eyes are still sad, still a little too angry, but her face is full of the same determination he’s seen a dozen times before.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, glancing down towards her hands, “about Shira.”

(There is no flash of pink around him, this time, and the ice of Hoth is so far the opposite of the warm jungles that Cassian almost gets whiplash thinking about them.)

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, head tilting to one side.

Jyn’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile returns, once again. “Not exactly,” she says. One eyebrow quirks upward as she leans forward again. Cassian leans into the kiss, this time; his chin bumps against hers, and he reaches out, resting a hand on one of her shoulders.

“Jyn,” he murmurs, breath hot against her mouth. “Maybe we should – I don’t know –”

“If you’re always going to be saying goodbye,” Jyn interrupts, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth, “then I want to have done this once where I was at least aware of it.”

The bite in her voice speaks to her earlier anger, and Cassian nearly pulls away for that reason alone. Her hands are hot against him, however, burning through his clothes and down to his skin.

“I’m not leaving you,” he says, the words transforming into a growl mid-sentence. “I may disappear for a while, Jyn, but I won’t leave you behind.”

His other hand falls down to Jyn’s waist in an attempt to haul her closer. Arms wrapped around her, he can feel her sharp laugh, not quite a bark, but a near thing.

“I don’t believe you,” she whispers, bringing her legs around his waist.

Cassian mutters something like a horrid curse and kisses her again.

Jyn’s hair comes undone more quickly, this time. Cassian throws her hair band across the room and grins when it smacks against the wall. He undoes her vest, next, and presses kisses to the tops of her breasts, clothed though they are (his mind flashes pink, for a moment, and he remembers the silk of them as he rutted between them, so close to coming again).

Jyn tightens her grip on his waist and rocks backwards onto the cot, then runs her hands down his still-clothed chest. Cassian buries his face in the crook of her neck and bites; when Jyn cries out, he softens and licks the wound he’s left behind.

It’s not gentle, the thing they do.

His trousers and pants end up around his ankles, though he doesn’t quite remember how it happens. The shirt Jyn stole from him ends up abandoned on his floor along with her breastband, and Cassian buries himself in her, there, kissing her nipples as they go tight with the cold. She weaves her fingers into his hair and grinds up against him, never too slowly but just on the edge of what he needs. He whines when she pulls him up to her for a kiss, but she swallows the sound, unforgiving as she rides him from beneath.

Her trousers soon join his shirt, as do her underwear. She shivers underneath him, though he imagines it’s just as equally from the cold as it is from want. The erection he’s sporting almost hurts for the combination, and as he enters her, he sags, relaxing into her heat. Jyn lets him pant against her collarbone as he slides in to the hilt.

“When we’re somewhere warmer,” he says as he begins to move, “I’ll eat you out for _hours_.”

Jyn’s eyes gleam at the promise, and she offers him a sharp-toothed smile. “I’ll suck you off in a supply closet,” she offers, gasping as one of his hands slides down to play with her clit. The other settles on her breast and plays with her nipple, effectively rendering her speechless. She kisses him again, biting and brutal, and he takes it, doing his best to stay mobile without crushing her. His elbows burn where they drag against the mattress of his cot, but Cassian is too far gone to care.

She comes first, as she is supposed to, and the burst of pride he feels nearly overpowers his own want. He watches, awed, as her mouth falls open; the sharp sounds she makes sends him barreling over the edge. She shivers around him, taking him as his hips stutter. When his hands fall to the side, she does her best to catch him, but they’re both sweating and trying their best to remember exactly how to breathe.

(She smells like him, Cassian realizes, somewhere in the middle of the white haze; him and gunpowder and something that’s not ice but that’s nearly as hard.)

It’s an effort to pull out of her and flop down at her side, but he manages. Jyn fixes her gaze on the ceiling even as he throws an arm around her waist. When he presses a kiss to her neck, he thinks she smiles, but it’s a there and gone sort of thing.

“Trust me,” he implores her, once his voice has returned. “You did once. Can you do it again?”

She doesn’t turn to look at him, doesn’t take her gaze away from the ice above their heads. “Trust goes both ways,” she says, an echo of a time now past. “The day you trust me, Cassian, is the day I’ll trust you.”

She doesn’t stay in his room, after that. He watches through half-closed eyes as she gathers her clothes from the floor. His shirt makes her skin look a shade too-pale, but he doesn’t demand it back. She pulls it on with such comfort that, even when he considers it, he finds that he loses heart.

“How long will you stay?” she asks, just before she heads for the door.

Cassian considers her for a quiet moment. She’s glowing, even in the dark, some shade of light blue and gold that doesn’t belong in ice caves underground.

“I’m not sure,” he replies, after a while. “But I’ll tell you before I go.”

The shadows are too dark for him to see the shifting planes of her face, and perhaps he’s better off for it. Still, the sharp pain of before returns to his chest as she goes to open his door.

“You better,” she says, some seconds before she disappears again.

Cassian stares at the door to his quarters for a long time after she leaves. When he goes to pull his pants all the way back on, he’s startled by the smell of her lingering on his sheets, on his skin, in his hair.

The hurt doesn’t stop, even in the hours after she’s left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See, there was consensual boogaloo-ing. Eventually. Not happy consensual boogaloo-ing, but it was there!
> 
> ...I'm sorry.
> 
> General Cracken is a part of Star Wars universe, but I decided it would be more fun if the Rebellion had a female general running their Intelligence sector alongside Draven. Kept the name, changed everything else. Hurray, fanfiction.
> 
> I'm a little worried about the characterization in this chapter, so I'd love your input. There will probably be another extension of this universe (it was supposed to be a ONE-SHOT) as Jyn and Cassian keep miscommunicating (or not communicating). Jerks.
> 
> Let me know what you thought!


	5. Jyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is meaningful conversation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *jazz hands* Thanks for all the support, folks! Despite all the grumbling, I've had a lovely time writing this piece. It was really interesting to explore the facets of this trope, and I'm glad you all egged me along as I went. XOXO

The goosebumps Hoth raises up on her arms twinge whenever Jyn goes to rub them, but that doesn’t stop her. She grits her teeth as she walks through Echo Base’s too-white halls, hair still mussed, brow still furrowed, but gait a little sideways and head a little dozy. Her aching eyes long for the comfort of Yavin IV, her feet for the steadiness of worn stone, not pounded snow. Her body aches for warm, but she won’t give that to it. Not yet.

(There’s a thundering in the back of her head and an ache in her chest, but pain moves through her veins as easily as blood does. Jyn ignores it all.)

Echo Base’s hanger greets her with a wide mouth, the dark sky outside hidden just beyond durasteel doors. Jyn winces as the temperature drops another two degrees; her thin jacket brushes against her too-sensitive skin and stings.

The hanger is still moderately full, people mulling about, muttering, filling the air with near-constant noise. The air smells like burning and like too-old X-wing fuel, but Jyn breathes deep, all the same.

(Flying in with the transport shaking around her had left her legs wobbly and her vision blurry, but she’d bitten her tongue until she couldn’t speak, couldn’t whimper, couldn’t complain. The last dregs of the Rebellion had limped off of Yavin IV, despite their victory. Space had dragged at the hull of their too-empty ship and chuckled, filling itself with broken parts and bodies and windstorms of ashy stardust.)

Jyn touches the kyber crystal still hanging around her neck. She lets it dig into the skin of her collarbone. Baze’s comm link presses up against her, bitingly cold.

“Jyn!”

Her head snaps around; a hand twitches for her absent blaster, and, though she doesn’t know it, her eyes go wide. Bodhi, a bottle in one hand and a brown jacket draped over his shoulders, slows the steps he's taking towards her. He approaches with his arms still spread wide, though the joy in his eyes tinges itself with a familiar caution.

“Hey,” he says once the space between them has dwindled. “I’ve been looking for you ever since your call came through.”

(It had been less of a call and more a spattering of words; both Jyn and Bodhi know that: _Safe, coming back, wait for me_ , all bound up in static and blaster bolts and fear. Jyn can still taste the steel if she licks the back of her molars; it lingers with the taste of – no. No. No. Moving on.)

“Sorry,” she says, reaching up and rubbing the back of her neck. When she doesn’t move, Bodhi steps forward, creeping into Jyn’s person space until her nose is pressed up against his collarbone. He smells like sweat and alcohol; his breath comes heavy in her ear as he wraps his arms around her.

“How much have you had to drink?” she asks (and her voice is not as light as she thinks it is, but Bodhi smiles, anyway).

“Rogue Squadron celebrations invite a lot of scoundrels,” he tells her, which means Captain Han Solo has been making the rounds again.

Jyn snorts but doesn’t pull away from Bodhi’s offered warmth. “Is there any left?”

She feels Bodhi’s nod, his chin brushing against the top of her head. Something tight and awful wells in the back of her throat, but she swallows it. Her grip on Bodhi’s jacket tightens for a moment before she lets him go, and her fingers itch afterward, settling into curled up fists at her side.

Bodhi studies her for a long moment after there’s more distance between them. Some of the merriment dulls in his eyes, not enough to kill the spark, but enough to make Jyn squirm.

“You saw Cassian,” he says, at last. It’s not a question.

Jyn offers up a short nod and a wry smile. When she doesn’t speak, Bodhi shakes his head. He holds an arm out for Jyn to duck under; when she does, his hand comes flopping down on her shoulder.

“You smell terrible,” she mutters as they start towards the corner of the hanger Rogue Squadron has monopolized.

Bodhi laughs. “Yeah, well, you don’t smell any better.”

*

Jyn doesn’t keep track of how much she drinks that night. Several glass bottles get passed from hand to hand, all of them varying shades of brown, and all of them burning away any sensation left in Jyn’s body. Bodhi stays at her side, laughing in her ear with his arm wrapped around her shoulder, but the way he sways makes it seem as though he’s more using her for support rather than protecting her. Jyn rolls her eyes at him, then hisses as the world starts to spin in on itself. She doesn’t quite know how she ends up on the floor of the hanger, but she does, and she drags Bodhi down with her.

When she wakes in the morning (or, at least, what she thinks is morning), drool has frozen to her chin in embarrassing icicles. Bodhi, his arm pressed up against hers, snickers as she tries to break them off with little success.

“What do we do now?” he asks, once they’ve both risen to their feet. The steps Jyn takes towards one of the icy hallways hurt, reverberating through her head and mocking her.

“Find a ‘fresher,” she grumbles, then winces at the sound of her voice. “Report to…somebody. I don’t know, anymore. Not Draven.”

Bodhi doesn’t quite snort, but it sounds like a near thing. “Craken’s here,” he says. “She’s Intelligence, too, though.”

“I’m not really sure I’m supposed to be Intelligence,” Jyn tells him. She bumps into someone in a bright orange flight suit and nods before continuing on.

“Then go to Mothma.” Bodhi has to duck his head as they come to the threshold that opens up the mess. Jyn shakes her head at him before moving towards what she assumes is the line for caf.

The ragtag collection of rebels scattered across the half-assembled tables look as bad as she feels, so she holds her head high as she retrieves a cup. Bodhi tags along behind her, muttering quiet thanks to the blurry-eyed technicians on the other side of the line.

When they sit down together, they fall to silence, resting their mouths on the edge of worn porcelain in order to keep the cups from growing cold.

“Mothma seems reasonable,” Jyn says, only once she’s drained her cup halfway. She blinks and glances around the mess as some of the tension returns to her shoulders. She catches no glimpse of familiar black hair, but that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to Cassian Andor.

“There’s always something to do for the Rebellion,” Bodhi mutters in return. He tracks her jumpy gaze but doesn’t follow it. He tilts his head, instead, and waits until Jyn can settle herself back on him. She shrugs in half apology and wraps her hands more tightly around her mug.

*

Mothma’s face is one predisposed, Jyn thinks, to diplomatic neutrality. She sits across from Jyn at a too-small table the Resistance had hauled from Yavin IV with her own cup of caf in hand, sleep still hanging around the corners of her eyes. Her white robes would be glowing, were the room any darker; the walls of Echo Base soften her some, though, make her more angel than ice queen.

“There are several options outside of Intelligence, of course,” she admits, gently blowing a waft of steam away from her mug. Jyn sits, legs crossed and hands folded in her lap. “And your…diplomatic skills are still in need of some growth.”

Jyn doesn’t snort. She really doesn’t.

“However,” Mothma continues. “I’d like to offer you a proposition before you go reporting in to the first officer you can find.”

She takes a long pull from her mug, weighing the air in the room. Jyn waits for her, foot twitching. “And that would be?” she asks, breaking.

Mothma’s mug clinks when it hits the table. Jyn thinks she sees a flicker of a smile pass over the senator’s face, but even if questioned, she could never say for certain. “We’re organizing a party to return to Shira,” she says, at last. “Your previous experience with the planet would make you a valuable member of the crew we have in mind.”

The urge to pull back her lips and snarl nearly overwhelms her; Jyn closes her eyes, her hands curling into tight, unforgiving fists in her lap. She focuses on her breathing and forces herself not to go red (the world _does not_ flicker pink when she opens her eyes again; her throat isn’t tight; she isn’t back on the jungle floor, wanting, aching, _begging_ ).

“I thought Shira had been rejected as a potential base,” she says. Her words come out more measured than she’d been expecting; Mothma, too, seems surprised, though she has the grace to hide it.

“The crew we've gathered include several botanists, all of whom would be able to explore the reach of the papaver roots and antidotes that would combat the influence of their pollen,” Mothma replies. “There is, of course, potential for us to use the flowers as some sort of chemical weapon –”

Jyn can’t help her snort; the image of several Stormtroopers abandoning blasters in favor of rutting against one another feels paradoxical, almost unthinkable. She does her best to control herself as Mothma’s gaze holds.

“Anything could be of use to us, now,” Mothma says, after she’s decided that Jyn’s expression has been suitably schooled. “It would be foolish of us to deny a gift simply because we could not understand it.”

Jyn shakes her head and lets the images die away. She coughs out the remnants of her laughter but doesn’t watch as they fall to the floor. “Who all’s on the crew?” she asks, instead.

She catches another glimpse of Mothma’s not-smile before the senator answers. “Botanists Arber, Linneaus, and Esau,” she says. “Kes Dameron will be on board, as well, serving as a…watchful eye.”

Jyn tilts her head, considering. “Would this be a Pathfinders mission, then?”

“No.” Mothma hesitates, then continues. “Captain Dameron requested a temporary reprieve from the Pathfinder missions. Shira offers what we hope will be a welcomed change of pace.”

The effort it takes Jyn not to snort again almost hurts her physically, but she finds that she manages to resist the urge. Mothma watches her with a careful gaze as Jyn settles back in her chair, her fingers rising from her lap to dance over the hard surface of the table.

(She hasn’t stopped dreaming of Shira, doesn’t think she ever will. But there’s Cassian – Cassian, whose scars she can map out by touch alone; whose tongue dances over her skin, sweet with lies; Cassian, who can leave her with just as much ease as her father and Saw and all the others who came before, even though she remembers the weight of him against her as they ran, on Scarif, and his words whispered in her ear, “ _Welcome home_ ” –)

Mothma clears her throat, a gentle reminder. Jyn doesn’t quite shake herself, but her gaze refocuses. Her fingers have gone still on the cool surface of the table.

“What about Captain Andor?” her own traitorous voice asks. “Where will he be going?”

She knows rumors about what happened on Shira have circulated through the rebels who came from Yavin IV; it’s a lighter story, she supposes, when compared to all the other tragedies the Rebellion has faced. This is why, Jyn tells herself, she’s unsurprised when one of Mothma’s eyebrows flickers upward. It settles less than a breath later, but the movement is unmistakable.

“Captain Andor goes where General Draven commands,” Mothma says, the standard non-answer of a politician. A small bead of hope centered in Jyn’s chest drops, sizzling away into a pit of grimacing pain. She pushes away from the table as Mothma continues. “His missions are strictly need to know,” the senator says. “However…”

Her voice trails away. Jyn doesn’t bother to hesitate; she stands at full height, her arms held flat against her sides. “I’ll go to Shira, ma’am,” she says, her voice beaten down flat.

Mothma blinks up at her. Jyn doesn’t furrow her brow, but she returns the senator’s long silence with one of her own.

Several heartbeats later, Mothma gives a sharp nod of her head. “I shall have Captain Dameron brief you at eleven hundred hours,” she says, rising as well. She has two or three inches on Jyn, but it doesn’t hurt to look up to her. “Before you go, Jyn, though, I wonder – as an official Intelligence agent, you would have access to more information about Captain Andor’s missions than you do as a volunteer. Would you like to declare a specialization?”

Jyn narrows her eyes.

(Somewhere, deep within the base, Cassian Andor is waking up with a sour mouth and a heavy heart. His blankets itch; he reaches out for a body that is not there and grimaces when his hand finds nothing. He will berate himself through his morning routine, mold himself into a model of control, but his eyes will still flicker through the base, looking for a familiar bun and stiff of set shoulders.)

“No,” Jyn says, at last. “No, not yet.”

It hurts more than she thought it would; some of her discomfort must show on her face, because Mothma’s patented diplomatic neutrality breaks in favor of something Jyn doesn’t want to call sympathy. She tucks it away, after a moment, and the expression is forgotten.

“The offer remains open,” she says, rising from the table. Her mug of caf is only half empty. “You’ll want to be at loading dock five in an hour or so, as it is.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Jyn rises, as well, and waits for the senator to leave the room before she follows. She watches out of the corner of her eye as Mothma’s white robes disappear, ensuring that she ends up going to opposite direction.

The white halls are no friendlier in the morning than they were the night before. Jyn goes to run a hand through her hair and grimaces at the way it crinkles.

Bodhi, she knows, is due to ship out shortly before she is; he’ll be retrieving a weapons shipment from their allies on Bothawui. The comm around her neck is heavy with the alert of a new message; Baze and Chirrut remain out of reach, though it’s reassuring to hear their voices whispering to her from so many lightyears away.

As for Cassian –

Jyn stills the turmoil that whips up in her head and focuses on her breathing.

Cassian will leave, off on another mission that she doesn’t really want to know about. She will see him intermittently until one of them dies or until the war is over, and after that, she won’t see him at all. Maybe they’ll still hold each other when the night goes dark, or maybe they won’t.

Jyn dodges another pilot as she walks down the hall and tells herself that it doesn’t matter.

*

She feels his gaze land on her neck just as she carries the last of the mission supplies into the transport she, Kes Dameron, and several over-enthusiastic botanists are in the process of prepping. Jyn shifts her grip on what she assumes to be scientific equipment and stows it as safely as she can in the ship’s main cabin. By the time she ducks out of the ship, Cassian has already commandeered Captain Dameron’s attention. He doesn’t look at her as she hovers on the gangplank, but the sudden tension in his body makes her want to turn away in an instant.

Jyn’s mouth falls at the corners, and she crosses her arms, but she doesn’t move, not even when one of the botanists calls out to her and asks what’s taking so long.

Captain Dameron – a good man, Jyn’s found, with a dirty sense of humor and kind eyes – glances up at her with a soft, almost tentative smile. He breaks from his conversation with Cassian and makes his way up the gangplank, clapping her on the shoulder as he passes her by.

“Take a minute, Sergeant,” he says. “I want to do a last minute maintenance review before we head out.”

Jyn doesn’t roll her eyes until he’s disappeared into the cabin. Cassian’s the only one around to see her do so, and he nearly smiles. He schools himself, though, and watches with a patience Jyn’s come to loath as she makes her way down the gangplank. She considers lingering at the end, if only to keep herself at eyelevel with him, but her steps are heavy and her body aches and it’s easier to support herself when she’s standing on solid ground.

She crosses her arms and looks up at him without saying a word. Cassian stares back at her, his expression neutral and his head gently tilted to one side. His bangs are beginning to fall into his eyes; Jyn considers reaching out and brushing them aside, but she resists the urge.

“How long will you be gone?” Cassian asks, at last.

Jyn shrugs. “Captain Dameron said it shouldn’t take more than a day, but there’s always a chance for delays.” It’s a line she’s borrowed from him, or maybe from Bodhi, or maybe from Draven. It rings true, regardless of the way it makes her tongue curl.

Cassian seems to recognize it, as least; the furrow in his brow grows deeper, the lines of his body tenser. A prick of guilt settles in next to Jyn’s heart, beating in time with it. An apology wells up in her throat, but she holds it back with clenched molars and waits for Cassian to speak.

“I’m shipping out tomorrow,” he tells her. Jyn spots a twitch in the muscles of his jaw and almost sympathizes. The silence that follows is that ‘almost’, however; he can’t tell her any more, and those words float between them, ruthless and aching.

“I’m going back to Shira.”

If possible, the look on Cassian’s face grows darker. “I know you are.” He shoots a glance in the direction Kes Dameron disappeared; Jyn doesn’t follow it, but raises an eyebrow, instead. She waits until Cassian looks back at her and does her best not to bounce with impatience.

“Something you want to say?” she asks.

She’s grown accustomed to the twists of Cassian’s face, the fine jolts of his fingers when he’s distressed. She doesn’t know if there’s anyone else on the base who would be able to detect the flicker of pain that flashes over his features besides her; to an onlooker, he may just look congested, or like he ate something bad in the mess.

The seed of guilt is joined by a larger, slightly vindictive vine of smugness as Jyn watches him tuck the feeling aside. She’s not proud of it – wouldn’t admit to it if asked – but watching him squirm feels…good. Really good.

“No,” he says, at last. “No, I don’t.” He reaches out, then, and claps his hand down on her shoulder. The cool expression on his features suggests that the gesture is supposed to feel impersonal, but the pressure with which he squeezes tells Jyn otherwise. “I’ll see you when you get back, Sergeant.”

Jyn doesn’t flinch as his hand falls away. The vindication in her gut shrivels, though, as he steps back from her gangplank.

“Stay alive, Captain,” she says through a throat that’s trying to close. She nods to him, short and crisp, then turns on her heel and marches back up the gangplank.

She doesn’t look back, not even as the gangplank recedes and the doors to the transport slide shut. She doesn’t look out the viewport to see if he lingers, but her shoulder burns, and her heart – her heart hurts in a way that threatens to leave bile in the back of her throat.

The botanists don’t look at her – too preoccupied with sets of charts or with equipment they’ve removed from their boxes – but Kes Dameron shoots her a look from the co-pilot’s seat that’s as sympathetic as it is knowing. Jyn tries to offer up her best approximation of a smile, but it feels more like a grimace as it settles on her features.

(She remembers the warmth of Cassian’s lips on her, unrelenting in the dark, and wonders if he’ll miss her while she’s gone.)

*

They land on Shira some twelve hours later, grumbling, sweaty, but ready to move forward. The planet is as humid as Jyn remembered; her clothes are sticking to her skin within moments, but she doesn’t complain. The botanists are trilling at one another, using words Jyn’s heard before but in strings that she doesn’t have the will to put together. Kes stands at her side as the botanists descend the gangplank and begin to step into the new world, dark grass flattening under their feet.

Jyn listens upward, tracking the path of a shrike as it floats above the clearing. Kes glances upward and smiles at the sight.

“Was it like this the last time you were here?” he asked.

Jyn looks at his sidelong, curious and amused. “There’s less wildlife the further in you go,” she says, watching Kes’s face for any sign of a reaction. “I’m not botanist, but I think there are areas that they know to avoid.”

She knows Kes has heard the stories; there isn’t anyone on the base who hasn’t. His face remains open, though, and his smile good-natured. “Makes sense,” he says with a casual shrug. One of the botanists starts to make for the nearby tree line; he pulls out his blaster and begins to follow. “Keep your eyes open,” he says as he starts to wander off. “And keep your scarf around your mouth and nose. We don’t want a repeat of last time.”

“Definitely not,” Jyn mutters. The Rebellion had been kind enough to replace her blue scarf after her previous one had been abandoned somewhere in Yavin IV’s hanger. She wraps it around her face and falls into step behind Esau, who’s too busy assessing the chemical makeup of one of Shira’s trees to pay her any mind.

She’s able to take lead, after ten minutes or so of poking around the landing area. They’re in a different part of the same jungle, given that the clearing they landed in was in the same latitude Jyn had previously been in. The air is just as muggy, and the foliage just as thick. As the tree trunks grow wider, Jyn re-secures her scarf around her mouth and nose and watches for the first of the bushes to come into view.

She freezes when she spots the pink flowers. Her abrupt stop leaves Esau stumbling; she bumps into Jyn’s back, then looks over her shoulder and lets out a pleased little sound.

“Are these the same as the ones you ran into before?” she asks. She has her own safety gear already secured; she procures a miniaturized microscope from one of her many pockets and takes a few tentative steps forward.

“They are,” Jyn says, watching her with wary eyes. She stays behind and tries to justify her nausea as Esau presses forward. Her breath catches and holds as the botanist plucks one of the flowers from the bushes.

Esau places one of the petals beneath her microscope, all the while taking a cautious step away from the bush. “Curious,” she murmurs, before tightening her sightline. Jyn makes note of her body language and tries to ignore her own tension.

(If Cassian had come back to Shira, would things have been easier? What would their walks have been like? Would they have stuck together at all? Jyn can hear Bodhi’s suppressed laughter interspersed with sympathetic hums; she can imagine the tension in the air, the tightness of her scarf around her mouth as Cassian forged the path ahead of her.)

(Would she let it go loose, just so she could have another chance?)

“Your droid friend was _mostly_ right, it seems,” Esau says. The sound of her voice jolts Jyn from a pink-tinged daze; Jyn shakes her head and takes a quick catalogue of her body’s reactions to the world around her. She takes care to slow her breathing and to check the security of her scarf around her face.

Several feet away, Esau sets her microscope aside and offers Jyn a reassuring smile. The distance between them remains steady. Jyn still doesn’t allow herself to relax.

“This flower shares traits with other papaver species,” Esau tells her, “though the organization of the veins suggests a shift in the chemicals that it produces.” She hums, then looks back into her microscope for a long moment. “Strange, though,” she says. “There’s something – well. I’ll need to do some tests back at the ship before I speculate further.”

She pulls a vial from another pocket and places the retrieved petal inside. Jyn keeps an eye on her as she turns away, returning to the bush in order to take samples of its stems, pollen, leaves, and roots, where they’re available. By the time she’s finished, her cheeks are flushed, but it seems to be more with exertion than anything else. Jyn maintains the space between the both of them, anyway.

“How’re you feeling?” she asks, her voice muffled by her scarf.

The botanist looks at her sidelong and offers up another tentative smile. “The back of my brain is buzzing a bit,” she admits, “so we’ll probably have to move soon.” She glances around the jungle, then lets out a soft huff of delight.

Jyn tilts her head. An eyebrow quirks upward, and her hand twitches towards her borrowed blaster.

“I’m thinking,” the botanist admits, “that there’s more to the effect of this plant that can be attributed to a standard aphrodisiac.”

“Oh?” Jyn does her best to look attentive, tries to make it look as though she’s not tensing around the shoulders.

The botanist hums. “I believe that this plant holds the same inhibition-lowering properties as fermented barley,” she says. “I can’t confirm this, of course, until I’ve had a closer look at the chemical structure, but it’s interesting to consider.”

Jyn makes a noise that sounds like an assent and continues to watch her companion.

When Esau glances at her again, she tilts her head, considering. “Sergeant Erso,” she says, keeping her words slow and crisp. “When you and Captain Andor –”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Jyn snaps.

The botanist’s eyes narrow, considering. “Alright,” she says, drawing out the word. “I won’t ask for details, but I do have questions, just for science’s sake. Would it be alright if I asked you some?”

“Can’t this wait until we’re back on the ship?” Jyn asks. She doesn’t want to admit it to herself, but her voice cracks with pleading.

Esau doesn’t step towards her, doesn’t offer up sympathy. Rather, she says, “I think you’d prefer me to ask them here; if I ask around others, things could get more uncomfortable for you than they already are.”

Jyn’s hand aches for the grip of her blaster. She stares Esau down, her heart pounding in her chest.

Esau seems to take her silence as an opportunity to press on. She remains standing several feet away, but Jyn’s skin itches, as though she were standing just a few inches in front of her.

“When you first arrived on Shira, how did you regard Captain Andor?”

The thundering of Jyn’s heart doesn’t slow, but some of the tension drains out of her face. “Excuse me?”

“This is important,” the botanist says, waving Jyn’s discomfort aside. “What was your opinion of Captain Andor upon your arrival on this planet?”

Jyn blinks, and her brow furrows deep. “He’s a friend,” she says, though the words taste bitter in her mouth. “He’s – he’s been with me in some of the worst moments of my life.”

“Would you say that the two of you were close?”

The furrow of Jyn’s brow grows deeper still. She opens her mouth and tastes the cotton of her scarf, then finds herself pausing. “I’m – not sure,” she says, after a beat. “I suppose so?”

She turns, just a little, and lowers her hand from her blaster’s holster. The pink flowers mock her from their gentle perches, so Jyn fixes her gaze on them and glares.

“I only ask,” the botanist says, “because if these flowers do possess inhibition-lowering properties, then that would further explain your encounter with the captain.”

Jyn looks back at her, gaze sharp, for less than a heartbeat before looking away again. “What do you mean?”

“Well, of course the plant has aphrodisiacal qualities,” Esau says. “But when you get drunk, for example, your inhibitions lower, and you tend to find yourself drawn to people you find yourself attracted to, be that attraction sexual or platonic. If you had a strong bond with the captain, it may explain why you were more susceptible to the flower’s influence.”

Jyn closes her eyes and tries to remind herself how to breathe. “That means these wouldn’t work all that well as chemical weapons against the ‘troopers,” she says. The noise that leaves her is meant to be a laugh, but it hurts her lungs just a touch too much. “They’ve had their empathy drained out of them.”

“It may impact the ones whose training hasn’t sunk all the way in,” Esau says, shrugging. “You’re more or less right, though. Really a shame. It’s not going to be fun to report this back to the generals.”

She hesitates a moment longer, her gaze fixed on Jyn’s frozen form. “Are you alright, Jyn?” she asks, after a beat.

Jyn offers up what she hopes is a convincing nod. Her gaze remains on the bushes, though her heart – it hurt. Everything about her hurts.

(The world isn’t pink, but it’s pretty damn cold; Cassian’s eyes lock with hers, angry and tired, so tired. He waits for her in the hanger, his brown coat pulled tight; the world bites, but his hands are warm, and –)

 (It’s entirely possible that she’s made a terrible mistake.)

“Can I borrow one of your vials?” she asks. When she looks back, it’s to see Esau studying her with a curious, sparking look in her eye. She hesitates, then pulls another vial out of her many-pocketed trousers.

“We should be heading back soon,” she says, voice measured. Jyn tries not to bristle under her knowing gaze, but her turn away is a little too sharp. She thinks she hears the botanist stifle a chuckle, but she ignores it in favor of continuing back the way she’d come.

She collects three of the petals and stuffs them into her vial along with a finger’s worth of pollen, all while holding her breath. She wipes her fingers on the grass at her feet, afterwards, and tries to ignore the way the world tinges sunset colors, just a little. Breath still held, Jyn retreats back towards Esau and the clearing the party had landed in.

Kes Dameron gives her a funny look as she herds the botanists back onto the transport, but he doesn’t ask her about the vial stuffed in her pocket. Their pre-flight check runs smoothly, and then they’re off the planet’s surface, hovering in space while the navigational droid calculates the most effective path back to Hoth.

Kes flops down beside her, then, and leans his head back against the cool metal of the ship’s interior wall.

“Excited to go back?” he asks, eyes drifting closed.

Jyn grunts. The sour smile that slinks onto her face is lost on the dozing Dameron, but she thinks he picks up on her mood, anyway. His elbow bumps hers as he brings his arms up to rest behind his head.

“Arber says that the effects of the plant are a bit conditional,” he says, after a beat. “Apparently it –”

“Effectively gets you drunk,” Jyn finishes, her voice gone taut. She keeps her gaze fixed forward, her hands distinctly away from the new lump in her pocket.

Kes hums. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

Jyn looks over at him without turning her head, one eyebrow raised as her eyes narrow into a glare. Kes only shrugs, a broad smile making its way onto his face.

Jyn rolls her eyes and focuses her attention on the navigation droid, instead. When it announces their prepared route, she braces herself and watches as the stars above Shira blur with the pull of hyperspace.

*

Hoth is twice as cold as she remembers after Shira’s oppressive humidity, but Jyn doesn’t let her goosebumps stop her. The transport lands with ease; she’s one of the first off the ship, rushing through her post-flight maintenance in order to get on her way. Kes only shakes his head at her; he reviews her work, then sends her off with an amused wave.

Jyn almost smiles at him before she goes. It’s a near thing. Kes almost deserves it. She gives it to Esau, instead, and relishes the surprised light that dances in the botanist’s eyes. Kes gets her least sarcastic salute before she turns on her heels and starts for Cassian’s room.

The vial bounces against her thigh as she jogs; Jyn keeps a hand over it, protecting it from the bodies she shuffles past. She catches sight of Bodhi in the middle of a pack of pilots. He waves at her, but doesn’t stop moving; if he can see the intent in her eyes, he doesn’t say anything. Jyn hesitates, then waves back before he disappears around the corner.

She doesn’t expect to bump into K-2SO.

He’s parked outside of Cassian’s door, arms crossed over his chest. Jyn’s reflexes are the only things that keep her from slamming into him when she rounds another corner; she leaps backwards, instead, and has to apologize to the rebel she bumps into. K-2SO doesn’t have the ability to blink at her, but as he watches her, Jyn knows that some distant, humanoid version of him is rolling his eyes.

“Cassian isn’t here,” he tells her in lieu of a greeting. “And you’re late.”

“I’m not late,” Jyn huffs. “The trip took a little longer than we expected.”

“And you were supposed to be back at 1800 last night,” K-2SO says. “Cassian’s late, too.”

When he doesn’t give her any more details, Jyn sighs and presses her hands to her hips. Her breath forms a cloud in front of her face, which condenses on K-2SO’s chest plate. “Let me in, Kay.”

“Why should I?” the droid replies. “You have your own quarters that you’re supposed to share with the other sergeants. Shouldn’t you go there?”

“I need to talk to Cassian when he gets back,” Jyn tells him. “In order to keep him from avoiding me, I need to engage in behavior that will be most effective in getting his attention. Surely you can at least appreciate the strategy of it.”

K-2SO’s optical sensors don’t narrow. His body doesn’t shift away from Cassian’s door. A few clicks are all the signs Jyn has of the droid’s consideration of her proposal.

“It would be more effective for you to sleep in the hanger,” K-2SO says, at last. “But given that you humanoids need to maintain a higher internal temperature in order to remain functioning, this would result in your death if Cassian took more than three more hours to return. If you slept in a shuttle, however –”

“Kay,” Jyn interrupts and does her best not to sigh. The droid goes quiet, but the tightening of his elbow joints speaks to his annoyance. “Please,” Jyn continues, “just let me inside.”

She waits, weight resting on her left hip, while K-2SO considers her. She’s never been so thoroughly scrutinized by a droid before; it makes her want to twitch, but she holds still, as patient as she can physically manage to make herself.

Then, K-2SO’s thoracic cavity shudders. Jyn flinches, then frowns. “Are you alright?”

“I was sighing,” K-2SO says. He steps away from the door, his feet crunching through the well-worn snow of the hall. “Enter, Jyn Erso. I shall remain here until Cassian returns, anyway, so that I may warn him of your presence.”

Jyn opens her mouth, ready to complain, then shuts it once more. She mutters her thanks and slips past the droid, ignoring the way his optical sensors train themselves on the back of her neck. She manages to close the door to Cassian’s quarters without turning around; the spark of satisfaction that settles in her chest makes the drawn out conversation almost worthwhile.

Her hovering in Cassian’s empty bunk, however, is enough to snuff the feeling. The corners of his bed are regulation crisp, his sheets unruffled. Jyn pokes through his things and finds all of his identical shirts folded with an inattentive ease (she still has the one she stole tucked away; it’s dirty, now, reworn on the trip to Shira, but she’s unlikely to part with it). The room is empty of weapons, of anything personal – a captain’s bunk it may be, but it could as well be anyone’s as it could be Cassian’s.

Jyn throws herself down on the cot with a disgruntled huff and sets her elbows on her knees. Careful fingers reach up and undo her hair from her bun; she doesn’t know how long Cassian is going to gone, and it’s unlikely K-2SO is going to let her leave after the hullabaloo she caused. She kicks off her shoes in the same moment her hair comes down around her shoulders. The kink where her hair tie had been won’t disappear until she’s showered or slept, but Jyn runs her hands over it, anyway.

There is an attached fresher just a few feet away; Cassian shares it with his neighbor, sure, but Jyn’s not even sure he has a neighbor, at this point. She hasn’t seen anyone else besides K-2SO in this side of the base since she returned.

She tilts her head, considering. Sonics aren’t nearly as pleasant as real, water showers, but Shira weighs on her like mud puddles clogging up a battlefield. She can still taste greenery in the back of her throat. It’s not that she wants it to go away (the vial in her pocket speaks to the opposite), but rather that she wants to feel…clean when Cassian returns.

(The vial clinks against the ground when she slips out of her rebel fatigues. Jyn glances down towards the pocket it’s been tucked into and bites her lip, a tinge of guilt rocketing through her chest. She has no intention of drugging the man, doesn’t even think it’d work. She just – if the botanist was right, then she and Cassian –)

The sonic shower makes her skin shiver as it blasts the dirt from her body. Jyn steps out of the ‘fresher dry but still reaches for a towel on instinct. She catches herself and shakes her head, then wanders back into Cassian’s bunk naked and freezing.

He’s still not back. Jyn hesitates, trying to ignore the shaking of her knees in the cold, and moves towards the door. One ear pressed against it, she can hear K-2SO shifting outside. The droid had been serious, apparently, when he told her he wasn’t moving.

Jyn lets out the softest sigh she can manage and steps away.

She steals yet another of Cassian’s shirts and takes pleasure in undoing the tight corners of his sheets, slipping under them with a distant sort of satisfaction. The pillow, at least, smells like him. She revels in that, her mouth curling up into a small smile as the room around her glows, still white in Hoth’s night, though the shadows grow longer.

She doesn’t dream, but her breathing evens out and the world goes still for a while. When she wakes, it’s to a hand on her shoulder and a familiar voice saying her name.

“Jyn. _Jyn_.”

She lets out a soft noise as she lifts her head and hopes, idly, that her hair isn’t as much as a bird’s nest as it usually is. Cassian blinks back at her in the darkness. The dark circles under his eyes have returned, and he’s still got his jacket on – hell, he’s still wearing his boots, Jyn realizes, glancing down; he’s just gotten back.

“You’re home,” she murmurs, before she can stop herself. Cassian goes still, his hand freezing on her shoulder. Jyn pulls back at once and lets his hand drop to the mattress between them. “What took you so long?” she asks, clearing her throat.

“My target was more rambunctious than we’d predicted,” Cassian says. It’s a concession, Jyn realizes, more information than she’s gotten out of him before.

“What time is it?”

“About 0300,” Cassian replies. He’s still staring at her, gaze following her every twitch. “What’re you doing here, Jyn?”

She looks away from him, at this, and gathers his blanket up in her hands. He doesn’t move to stop her, nor to draw her gaze back to his. He waits, patient, while the silence around the both of them grows heavier.

“We should talk,” Jyn says to the frozen floor.

She doesn’t have to look up to know that Cassian’s face has gone professionally neutral. “We are talking,” he says, voice forcefully light. “Could you be more specific?”

She almost lifts her gaze to glare at him, but fixes it on a crack in the ice, instead. “About Shira,” she says, her teeth gritted. “We should – talk about Shira.”

More silence follows. Jyn risks a glance up and sees Cassian still staring, still waiting, his face a mask. Her lips ache to pull back in some sort of growl; fire surges to life in her chest. She _hates_ that expression on him, hates it especially when it’s directed at her.

So instead of saying more, she reaches down towards the trousers she’d left abandoned before climbing into bed. She keeps her gaze locked on his as she goes. The vial is a little more difficult to get a hold of blind, but if Chirrut manages more complicated things on a daily basis, then Jyn figures that she can manage this.

The flicker of emotion that passes over Cassian’s face when she presses the vial into his hand is – startling. Jyn feels her breath catch, but she holds firm. Cassian breaks his gaze with her to look at the vial for a long, unsteady moment. When he looks back, his mouth has fallen down, and his pulse is leaping beneath his skin.

“What is this?” he growls.

“Botanist Esau says that the flowers on Shira have inhibition-lowering properties as well as aphrodisiacal ones,” Jyn says. She has to work to keep her voice steady; a glance down reveals that Cassian’s hands are shaking. “She said that – that exposure to them was like getting drunk, then having your drink spiked. The spiking fucks you up, but when you’re just tipsy, you’re…” she hesitates, then clears her throat. “You’re drawn to the people you care about. Or so she said.”

Cassian’s hands haven’t quite stilled, but the volcanic rage tucked beneath his gaze has altered, if only a little. He looks, now, vaguely confused.

Jyn has to resist the urge to roll her eyes in order to preserve the seriousness of the moment. “Of all the people who landed on Shira, that first time,” she says, “you’re the only person I would’ve wanted to end up with. Does that make sense to you?”

Lava turns to ash. Cassian blinks, brow furrowing and mouth falling open. He shuffles and passes the vial of pink petals back and forth between his hands.

“I need more sleep,” he mutters, more to himself than Jyn. She almost laughs, but forces herself to stay still, watching him as he, in turn, stares down at the petals.

She jumps when she hears him let out a soft chuckle. His eyes have drifted shut, but his grip on the vial hasn’t slackened.

“I suppose we needed it,” he admits without looking up. The vial continues to slip from hand to hand.

“I – suppose,” Jyn tentatively agrees. Cassian glances at her through thick lashes with a question in his eyes; Jyn shrugs, unsure of how to respond.

“Jyn, would –” Cassian begins, his voice dying away. He clears his throat and looks down at the vial again, his mouth dipping down into a softer kind of scowl. “If – if we’d never gone to Shira, I don’t know – the Rebellion –”

Some small part of Jyn’s heart sinks. She sits and lets Cassian stutter over his words, then pulls her legs out from beneath his blanket. He goes quiet, at this, and watches as she settles her bare feet against the cold ground.

“I know, Cassian,” she says, voice too smooth to reveal any sort of heartbreak. He doesn’t stop her when she goes to stand, doesn’t even move. Jyn takes her trousers with her and pulls them back on; the metal buttons are so cold that they sting against her skin.

“If you ever want to again, though,” she says, and hears herself choke. Cassian’s back goes stiff; she turns away so she doesn’t have to see. “You have those.” A stray hand motions towards the vial.

She’s not looking when Cassian’s scowl grows darker. Jyn pulls her hair back up and straightens out the shirt she’s stolen – she’ll give it back to him eventually, along with the other, maybe before she reports in to one of the more war-mongering generals. If she moves quickly enough, she could be on a transport out to some distant battle ground by morning.

Cassian’s hand closes around her elbow. Jyn closes her eyes and goes deathly still.

His breath is warm against the skin of her neck, his arm tight where it wraps around her waist. The noise that escapes Jyn’s traitorous mouth sounds almost like a sob; she doesn’t mean to sag into him, but she does.

“Jyn,” he says, a puff of air against her too-cold skin. “I don’t _need_ those.”

(Concessions, concessions: the lives they build up around each other are always going to be full, Jyn thinks, of concessions.)

He presses a kiss to her neck, first, his hands settles on either of Jyn’s slack arms. When he turns her around and faces her, he pauses. Jyn blinks up at him, bottom lip unwobbling but heart a little beaten, a little raw, and nods. She has to stand on her toes to kiss him on the mouth, always will, but the feel of him giving beneath her makes the strain worth it.

She doesn’t know where the vial goes. Maybe it ends up underneath the bed; maybe Cassian tucks it into one of his pockets. Jyn doesn’t keep track of it as she kisses him. She keeps her movements slow, almost cautious, and lets him seize her in his arms. Cassian’s the one who pulls her back towards his cot; _Cassian’s_ the one who kisses her until the room starts to spin. When a breathless laugh escapes her lips, Cassian’s the one who consumes it, greedy as he memorizes the divots of her lips.

His hands are hot through the fabric of the shirt that she’s borrowed; he seems to recognize it with his mouth buried in the crook of her neck. The satisfied hum that he lets out in response leaves Jyn shivering against him, wrapping her legs around his waist as his hands slip beneath the fabric and onto her skin. She hisses, dark and low, in his ear, and feels him hard beneath her.

“Did you miss me, Captain Andor?” she asks, low and teasing. Cassian’s clever fingers tweak her nipples and leave her gasping, jokes fluttering away like the gentle snow of Hoth’s tundras.

“I suppose I did,” Cassian purrs. His teeth graze Jyn’s earlobe as he slows the roll of his fingers; Jyn wiggles against him, heat flaring to life in her belly. “But only as much as you missed me.”

She nearly laughs at that, but then his hands are encompassing the whole of her breasts and she’s too distracted by the ride of his hips to think of anything else. She laces her arms around his back and relishes the friction of his fatigues. She pulls back, kisses him on the nose, then on the mouth, and lets him lean her back onto the thinness of the cot.

Her fingers catch on his belt, but are quick to throw it aside. When she shivers, Cassian covers her, radiating warm with a vicious smile. Jyn winds her fingers through his dark hair and pulls him to her, growling into his mouth and grinding up against him. Her underclothes are slick, her skin buzzing; he’s hard against her, desperately so.

He keeps his shirt on when they come together, much like she keeps his. His hands are buried beneath the fabric, lavishing her breasts; hers are holding on to his waist, guiding his cock to her slit and relishing the way he gasps at her wetness.

(“Why,” she will ask, much, much later, “does it surprise you that I want you?”)

Cassian contents himself to press his mouth against hers as he slides into her. Jyn still winces, despite the pleasure pain burn, but her body knows Cassian’s more intimately than anyone else’s in the galaxy (runaway rebels don’t have time for repeat lovers; she may just have to settle down if she wants to do this again and again and again –).

He presses into her, slow and lingering, though the burning in Jyn’s lower belly drives her own hips faster, her own breaths more desperate, her grip on Cassian’s body tighter. He smiles into one of her many kisses and brings a hand down to toy with her clit. Jyn’s mouth falls open, and he licks his way inside; when her world goes white, he feels it – she clenches around him and cries out, her head falling back onto the cot and her entire body stringing itself out like a livewire.

He comes with a few pumps more of his hips and rests his head above her breasts, forehead pressed against her collarbone. Jyn rubs his back and whispers nonsense in his ear that she herself barely understands. His beard drags against her skin; no doubt it will have left marks, but, half dozing, Jyn finds that she doesn’t mind.

She considers talking. She knows he does, too; his body shifts, pulling out of her, and reveals a contemplative mind not quite settled by their mutual satisfaction. He curls up at her side, anyway, and tucks her against him before resting his chin atop her head.

Jyn presses a kiss to the dip of his collarbone and closes her eyes.

Her dreams, when they come to her, aren’t tinged with pink. They’re glowing, instead: pristine, tingling, white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's your consensual, enthusiastic boogaloo. Let me know what you thought! If you want to see a bunch of posts about writing/Star Wars generally, come check me out at coppernailpolish.tumblr.com.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought!


End file.
